


Never Gonna Change

by likeporcelain



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Abusive Marriage, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Dany and Robb are married, F/M, Jon and Daenerys Are Not Related, Major Daenerys Targaryen/Robb Stark, Minor Jon Snow/Ygritte, Modern Era, POV First Person, R Plus L Does Not Equal J, Robb Stark character assassination (in the figurative sense), Some smut but I wouldn't consider it explicit, Switches between Jon and Dany's POV, Unrequited Love, Warning: explicit and implicit depictions of domestic abuse, no magic, some sexual language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-09-22 12:10:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 48,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17059523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likeporcelain/pseuds/likeporcelain
Summary: Memories of a single night years ago still haunt Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen as they make fruitless attempts to live normal lives, but while Jon is content to remain in his hole of guilt and sorrow, Dany makes attempts to dig her way out of the trap she let herself fall into. However, a sudden death in the family will turn both of their respective plans upside down as they are now forced to confront the events which shattered their relationship, but could never diminish the love between them.(Title comes from "Never Gonna Change" by Broods)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> ***Please Read: This fic contains a lot of angst, mature/triggering themes (including death/loss and domestic abuse), and characters who are misguided, depressed and flawed. I hope you enjoy this work, but if you do not, I understand and respect that. If at any point this work is not to your liking, I will not be offended if you choose to stop reading. I have rated this fic "Mature" for a reason. To reiterate: It's just a story. I wrote it for my own personal enjoyment and creative growth and do not expect it to appeal to all readers. Enjoy, or don't. No pressure. (added to Notes on 12/23/18 between the posting of the 4th and 5th chapters)***
> 
> First, I'd like to thank anyone and everyone who has read any of my previous works, especially A Crack in Everything and Anatomy of a Shadow (because those were both a ton of work and a lot of fun to write). You're all so wonderful and supportive. And if you haven't read them and think you might want to, please do, but no pressure! Just by clicking on this fic, I already love you. Just like with those two, this fic is completely finished so I will be posting often (every day or every other day). There are nine chapters in total.  
> Lastly, I'd like to apologize to any readers who expected me to post a new work a lot sooner than this. I'm that frustrating sort of perfectionist where if I don't think a story is as perfect as I can possibly make it, my anxiety won't allow me to post it so I have been letting at least a couple of finished fics sit on my laptop. Also, I was actually working on a different fic, but it was taking a lot longer to finish than I thought it was going to and after about 3 months, I decided I needed a break from it and began this one, which I finished in about one month. I hope you all enjoy it!

**JON**

It’s Monday, but I worked all weekend and it feels like a Wednesday. Everyday feels like a Wednesday. 

My calloused hands grip the steering wheel as I turn into a minuscule parking lot beside one of those quintessential Los Angeles cafés tucked between tall corporate buildings that only somewhat shelter the three-square blocks from the homeless and pan-handling population. Coming from work, I’m not dressed for lunch at such a professional setting but one thing I’ve learned about LA in the ten years I’ve lived here is that looking out of place is more normal than fitting in. I wipe the dirt off my arms and the dust from what one might consider a beard that I’ve lazily let grow upon my face before climbing out of my truck. 

There is a row of black metal two-top tables in a line in front of the café where lawyers and moneymen sit in their business casual attire, talking shop with one another or chatting on their bluetooths. Ygritte sits at one of these tables alone, eyes squinted off at nothing while her hand rubs at the sole of her bare foot under the table, a black heel lying on its side on the ground. I walk up and her eyes find me. She waves and her thin lips widen across her face in a bright smile. I smile too, but at this point I can never tell if I smile because I’m happy or because it’s what I’m supposed to do. I do know that these days, whenever I’m around Ygritte, it’s the only time I’m ever not completely unhappy. 

“You look tired,” she tells me as soon as I sit down. It’s what she tells me almost every time we meet and I never challenge her on it. “I ordered for you. I hope that’s okay. I don’t have much time, unfortunately.”

“It’s fine. You know I’ll eat anything.”

Ygritte works as much as I do, though in a completely different profession. She sits behind a desk crunching numbers and reading dreary documents while I stand outside all day, fixing things and breaking things and making new things out of old things. We don’t see each other often and we’ve never been to each other’s homes but what I have with her is the closest thing to intimacy I’ve felt in a long time. 

While we eat, she tells me about work, because it’s the only thing she has to talk about and I don’t mind listening even though I don’t understand most of what she’s saying. Next, I tell her about my own work, because it’s the only thing I can talk about. It would feel wrong to talk about anything else. 

We first met at a bar, because bars are the only places I go to besides worksites and home and now instead of going to bars I see Ygritte and we talk about work and depending on where we are, we fuck. The fucking is good. I think she likes guys who are rougher around the edges and she’s pretty wild herself given her boring, high-paying job and boring high heels that give her blisters. But it isn’t all about the fucking, even though that’s what our relationship is designed around. I’ve grown to enjoy the sound and inflections of her voice and her sometimes strange sense of humor. I have to force myself not to feel guilty about that just as I had to force myself not to feel guilty the first time I hooked up with a random woman. I’m still not sure what it is I feel guilty about, though. That I’m enjoying the company of women other than the one I promised to spend the rest of my life with, or that I’m enjoying anything at all after what happened. 

“Jon, I know it’s silly, but can you give me a ride back to work? It’s two blocks but feels like twenty when I walk in these fucking things. I don’t know why I didn’t bring flats with me to work. I just wasn’t thinking this morning. I told you I had to wake up at five this morning, right?”

“Yeah, it’s fine.”

I pay the bill – almost thirty bucks for two sandwiches but that’s Los Angeles for you – and she slides into her shoes. She’s limping and holding onto my arm as we walk to my truck and I put my arm around her because I don’t want her to fall and also because I like feeling her body whenever I can. It isn’t always sexual either, but if I’m being honest, it usually is. 

In the truck, Ygritte takes my hand before I can turn my key in the ignition. 

“I wanted to talk to you about something, actually,” she says. “But, I thought it best to do so in an environment where you feel at peace.”

“Are you mocking my truck again?”

She half smiles. “Let the pina colada air freshener relax you while I say what I’m about to say. Do you need to put on your Lenny Kravitz CD?”

“Quit making fun of me and tell me.”

“I like you.”

I wait for her to continue, but she simply blinks her long eyelashes at me. “That’s it? I like you too.”

“I mean I _like_ you,” she repeats. “And I want you.”

With a reflexive lift of my eyebrow, I assure her that I want her too.

“I mean that I want you exclusively. As in, you and me being together in a real relationship. I know that you think that your life has to stay exactly the way it is until the end of time, but that’s not how it works. Things change. People fall in love and then they fall out of love and sometimes they fall in love with someone new. It’s not a terrible thing and it doesn’t make you a terrible person.”

My eyes squint as I stare at the freckles on her forehead, wondering what all I told her while I was drunk that I can’t remember. I wouldn’t have told her I loved her, would I? Because I don’t. One of the only certainties I have in this life is that I don’t love Ygritte. 

Sensing my unease, she looks away with a chuckle, swishing her long red hair over one shoulder. A look that is the closest thing to discomfort I’ve ever seen on her, but she plays it off with style. “Look, I’m trying to tell you that I’m not going to screw anyone else, alright? It’s not that big of a deal. Forget I said the other stuff. You can do what you want but I already know I’m the only one you’re sleeping with. Would be nice to actually _sleep_ together every once in a while. You can even bring your dog. For the sleeping, not the screwing.”

For a while I stare at my steering wheel. Feels like forever. Eventually Ygritte’s slender fingers find their way into my seldom-washed hair, her short nails grazing my scalp in a way that almost makes me purr. 

My eyes fall shut. “Yeah. It would be nice.”

“I know. I just said that.” Her breath hits my ear before her lips and tongue follow and now I really am purring. As her other hand makes contact below my belt, she murmurs “I wish I didn’t have this fucking conference call to get to. I want to go down on you so bad.”

She barely gets the last word out before I capture a handful of her hair and turn my head to press my mouth against hers, hard and sloppy and not at all the sort of kiss you give someone in a café parking lot in broad daylight but she kisses me back just as ferociously, sucking on my tongue before pulling herself away from me and situating herself back into the passenger seat. 

“I really do have to get to that call, though,” she states breathlessly. “But, you could come over tonight and. . .”

“I can’t tonight.”

She eyes me with a sly smile. “Then find a night and let me know.”

I groan at the fact that I’ll have to drive with a hard-on now, but nod and finally turn that key in the ignition. 

It’s a two-minute drive with all the jaywalkers and awkwardly placed street lights, but in that short amount of time, Ygritte finds a need to scavenge through the glove compartment – something about needing gum, but the aforementioned hard-on distracts me from her affinity for snooping. It isn’t until I’m pulled over at a red curb in front of her office building that I look over and see the glove compartment left ajar, Ygritte’s hands holding a photo in her lap, staring at it like she may discover holy scripture within the black and white pixels. 

My throat drops into my gut and I wrack my brain trying to remember taking that photo out of my bedside drawer and leaving it in my glove compartment. I got drunk at home Friday night and woke up the next morning in the passenger seat of my truck, still parked in the garage. That must have been it.

For a good minute we sit in silence as Ygritte’s eyes look over the grainy picture. She’ll find the date stamp on the bottom and hopefully that will answer enough of her questions that she won’t bother asking me any of them, but I’ve never been particularly fortunate. 

“Jon,” she eventually speaks, picking her head up to look at me with the most serious expression I’ve seen on her. “Do you have a kid?”

No one has ever asked me that before and I don’t know whether to laugh or throw up. I swallow hard just in case. “No.”

She appears conflicted then, looking from me to the photo, back to me and then at the car door. She’s gone a moment later, out of the door and moving quickly with a slight hobble into her building, leaving me to stare down at the sonogram left face up on the passenger seat cushion. 

_22 weeks_

How many weeks has it been since I looked at this photo through sober eyes? Too many to count. 

* * * * *

**DANY**

I don’t know how long I’ve been staring at the soup cans that line Isle 4 but they’re all beginning to blend together and I think this is the third time I’ve heard this particular eighties minor-hit play on the grocery store speakers. Creamy Tomato or Tomato and Basil? Which is his favorite again? I should know this, I _do_ know this, but it’s left my mind and no matter how long I stare at this wall of soup I just confuse myself more. Campbells or Progresso? And what about Opera’s new line of soup? No, he wouldn’t like that. 

The skin on my ring finger feels raw as I slide the diamond band off and on, off and on over and over and over again, but no matter how much it’s beginning to hurt I keep doing it. I’ll need to stop at the meat counter next, get some bacon and burgers and maybe a few steaks because what the hell. May as well spoil him a little one last time. I wonder if there’s even any point in venturing into the produce section. By the time he decides to eat nutritiously the lettuce will be mush and the berry’s rotten. Maybe a few apples at least. He loves to dip the slices into caramel sauce. Perhaps I’ll get a container of that as well. 

Tomato and Basil! That’s the one he prefers! I reach for it like I’ve accomplished something, but as soon as the cans are in my cart, I feel hollow once again, like I haven’t eaten in weeks when it’s really only been about twenty-four hours. Ever since I bought the latest plane ticket. I haven’t felt this sick in a long time which is how I know I’ll finally make it to the terminal this time. 

“Dany!” a voice calls out from further down the isle and I ignore it at first because Dany is a fairly common name. It could be a man’s name or a woman’s name, adult or child, but they continue to call it out. “Dany! Dany, dear!” It’s getting louder, closer. I have no choice but to slide the ring back onto my finger and turn toward the voice with the fake smile I’ve practiced daily for longer than I can remember. 

“Olenna! How are you?” I greet the elderly woman approaching me at a crawl, leaning her elbows on the handlebar of her shopping cart. “I’m sorry, I’ve been lost in thought. Left my list at home and am just trying to make sure I get everything.”

She raises a wrinkled brow at the contents of my own cart. “You stalking up for a flood, dear? Or just preparing for a party I wasn’t invited to.”

“Olenna, you know you’re always invited to our parties. Just need to make sure the husband has enough food while I’m away. You know men. . .”

“Away? By yourself?”

My fake smile falls as I realize what I’ve done. The biggest gossip in town and I’ve told her I’m going away without my husband. Maybe this is a good thing, though. Now I can’t chicken out again. I’ll have to leave. Or admit that I’m a coward, which I’ve never had a problem doing before. 

“Yeah, I’m going to go visit my brother on the East coast for a bit,” I lie. I don’t even know if Viserys is still living in the East, or still living at all. 

“Is everything alright?” asks Olenna, looking up at me with her fierce, mothering eyes.

“Oh, yeah. He’s fine. I just want to –”

“I mean with you, dear. Is everything alright with you? I haven’t seen you in some time. My son has been keeping me on a tight leash – says I’m too old to be driving, the buffoon – but I’ve been thinking about you. Everyone has.”

“I’m fine, really –”

“These things happen.” She reaches out and takes my clammy hand into her cold, leathery one. “It isn’t your fault. It isn’t anyone’s fault. Some miracles just aren’t meant to happen.”

“Yeah,” I reply, dry and coarse, no longer pretending to want to remain in this conversation. 

“Just try again. Keep trying and when you’re meant to be a mother, it’ll happen.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll have a talk with your husband. I’m sure he’s really been beating himself up over this mess as well, but you can’t lose sight of what’s most important. You two were meant to be together. I don’t know why he’s letting you run off across the country by yourself either.”

“I really have to get going, Olenna. I’ve still got a few more isles to hit.”

“Alright, honey.” She releases my hand and steadies herself on her shopping cart. “Remember what I said, though. Keep trying. You two are too beautiful not to keep trying. Those Targaryen eyes with that Stark hair. You’ll be wonderful parents. Not too soft, not too hard. I’ll see to that.”

I muster up another fake, albeit small, smile that quickly disappears as soon as I’ve turned my back to her. Trying to remember the last time I took advice from that old bat is even harder than remembering the last time I wanted to fuck my husband. Why I’m even bothering with this shopping trip, I don’t know. I’m almost certain he’s cheating on me anyway. I actually hope that he is, because then I can put the blame on him when I don’t return from my “visit East,” but that wouldn’t be fair. He loves me. He always has. At first that was enough. That was enough for a long time actually and I thought it could be enough forever, but then I started hiding money and buying plane tickets and. . . everything else.

It takes me a half hour to finish my shopping. If he came home for lunch today, he’ll have gone back to work by the time I get these groceries home, which is precisely how I planned it. My flight leaves at five. I’ll already be on the plane by the time he gets off work, tens of thousands of feet above the ground by the time he gets home and realizes half my closet is gone and so am I. After loading the groceries into my car, I slide my wedding band off once more, this time dropping the piece of metal into the cupholder between the front seats. I feel better without it on. 

Turning onto our street, I feel a shock in my chest seeing the blue Ford parked in our driveway. He’s home. . . Why is he home? I almost punch the gas and drive right on by because it’s half past one and he should be at work and if he’s not at work that means that something happened to make him stay at home, like if perhaps he found something he shouldn’t have, like the suitcase I’d dug out of the garage and stashed under our bed, or the checkbook to the personal account I opened up two years ago with my leftover allowance, or the pallet of birth control pills tucked under the cotton balls and behind the extra toothpaste boxes under the bathroom sink. 

I park at the curb, though, and decide to play it cool. If he confronts me, I can always bring up the affairs, even though I’m still not entirely sure he’s having any. Lugging four full bags in my hands, I manage to push open the front door with my knee and sure enough, slumped on the sofa wearing a distraught and displeased expression is the man I hoped I’d have the guts to never see again, but now his eyes pierce into me like lasers. 

“Where have you been?” he asks with a gravely voice that tells me he’s either really angry or really sad. Maybe both. 

Dropping the grocery bags to the carpet, I stand just within the open front door and answer as innocently as I can “Shopping.”

The sofa creaks as he rises from it, eyeing the bags the same way Olenna eyed my cart in the store. “You buy the whole fucking store out? Didn’t you just go shopping last week?”

“What’s wrong?” I ask despite not wishing to know the answer, because it would be more suspicious if I didn’t ask and I already decided to play it cool. 

His hands raise to rub his eyes, then continue on to rake through the gelled curls on his head. Without looking me in the eye, he answers “Uncle Benjen is dead.”

Confusion washes over me at the last response I expected to hear from my husband’s mouth just then. I’m not even sure I heard him correctly. 

“Brain aneurysm. Right there in his shop. Edd called me once the paramedics took him away and then the hospital called soon after. He was already dead. I’ve got to go make an official identification, but I’ve just been sitting here waiting for you to get home from wherever the fuck you’ve been for two fucking hours.”

“I was. . .” I begin, but my words feel hollow. I’m stuck in a limbo of selfish relief that I hadn’t been caught in one of my lies and selfish dread that I won’t be able to leave now. Another plane ticket wasted. Another year or two or five of wearing this ring that I frantically slid back on before getting out of my car. Not even the sudden death of a beloved family member could awaken my long-lost honor. I begin to cry, not even for Benjen, but for my own hopeless soul. 

“I’m sorry,” I say like I’m begging for forgiveness as I cross the living room and put my arms around my husband like I haven’t done in six months, when he came home from a business trip in Portland and I told him I’d had another miscarriage. He tucks his face into the curve of my neck and I can feel his tears cold against my skin. I make myself forget about how much I hate the smell of his aftershave while I run my hand up and down his back, whispering “I’m sorry, Robb. I’m so, so sorry” over and over and over again. 

* * * * *

I didn’t go in with Robb – into the room at the end of a long hall in one of the below-ground levels of Eugene Memorial Hospital. I wait in the windowless hallway under a flickering fluorescent light and when Robb emerges from the room, escorted by a nurse who’s Snoopy-print scrubs come off as uncomfortably misplaced, he looks even worse than when he went in, as if some part of him had been hoping it was all some sick joke until he saw Benjen’s obviously dead corpse lying naked on a metal table. 

“Do you want to see him?” Robb asks me without looking anywhere close to my direction, in that half angry, half sad tone he hasn’t dropped since the house. 

“No,” I answer a bit too quickly, but the question startled me. Sure, I loved Benjen just as everyone in town loved Benjen, but I never thought our relationship reached the ‘take a look at my dead naked corpse on a metal table in a basement hospital room’ level. 

But Robb didn’t care, or at least he was too preoccupied being half angry and half sad about his uncle’s sudden death to bother showing how much he cared that his wife is an insensitive bitch. “Then let’s go,” he huffs, taking me by the shoulder and leading me in the direction in which the Snoopy nurse leads him. 

Next came the paperwork. So much paperwork. It takes an hour for Robb to finish and I have no earthly idea why the hospital would need his signature on so many leaves of paper. But as he finishes up, I find my way to a restroom and take a look at my phone. Some texts from Robb’s sister, Sansa, which is always unusual but given the circumstance I suppose I should have expected it. I don’t read the messages but I figure her only reason to contact me is because Robb hasn’t been checking his phone. 

The time reads 4:48. My flight would have already started boarding. I’d probably be sitting in my middle seat toward the back of the plane by now, sweating and crying and stressing over the implications of my actions. Thanks to Benjen’s aneurysm, I’m not so lucky to feel anything at all. I’m probably not much more alive than he is. I long to ceremoniously tear my plane ticket into a million pieces and shove them down into the garbage as a first step to accepting the fact that my future is no longer so beautifully uncertain. But since the almost always glorious invention of having your tickets texted to you with a scannable barcode, I cannot even grant myself the minute satisfaction of performing such a mundanely dramatic act in the privacy of an empty hospital bathroom. 

On the car ride home, back to our little town about thirty miles outside of the city, I finally read Sansa’s texts. 

“Sansa’s going to meet us at the house tonight,” I tell Robb. 

“Why?”

The question startles me as much as when he asked me if I wanted to look at his uncle’s dead body. “I don’t know. Aren’t there things that have to be taken care of? Arrangements?” 

“I don’t know. Do you think I know what to do? I don’t know how to make arrangements. I was a kid when Dad died. I don’t remember how my mom arranged it all, and when she died, Benjen basically took care of everything.”

“I know.”

“So I don’t know what to do. Do you know what to do?”

I don’t. My parents died long before I had even the mental capacity to remember their faces much less their funeral services and when the man who raised me died, he left explicit instructions not to have any sort of service. A simple cremation. No ceremony, no party. Just me, his remains and someone to hold my hand as I scattered them someplace beautiful. 

Before my mind can wander too far into the past, I pry one of Robb’s hands from the steering wheel and hold it on my lap. I tell him “Sansa will know what to do. She’s good at knowing what to do” and not another word is spoken from either of us until the eldest Stark sister and her own husband arrive at our door with sullen faces and a box of donuts to soak up some of the sadness.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic contains a lot of angst, mature/triggering themes (including death/loss and domestic abuse), and characters who are misguided, depressed and flawed. I hope you enjoy this work, but if you do not, I understand and respect that. If at any point this work is not to your liking, I will not be offended if you choose to stop reading. I have rated this fic "Mature" for a reason. To reiterate: It's just a story. I wrote it for my own personal enjoyment and creative growth and do not expect it to appeal to all readers. Enjoy, or don't. No pressure.

**JON**

“Twenty-two.”

“Twenty-three.”

“Twenty-four.”

I grunt out the next number every time my elbows touch my knees, the carpet under my back growing moist with sweat each time I lay down between sit-ups. Ghost watches me from the couch, his limbs hanging off the side and his tongue hanging out of his wide mouth. 

“Forty-eight.”

“Forty-nine.”

“Fifty.”

I collapse down onto the floor and that is Ghost’s cue to hop off the couch and use his tongue to swipe the grease from my forehead. I let him a couple of licks before I shoo him away. 

“Ghost,” I say firmly to get his attention. “Remote.”

Ears sticking straight up, Ghost trots over to the dining table and when he returns, the television remote is between his teeth. I tell him he’s a good boy after he sets it down beside me. I stopped paying for cable but there’s a football game on one of the Network stations. Two teams I don’t care anything about, but it’s something to do until I’ll fall asleep in the living room for a few good hours until my phone will buzz me awake at the ripe hour of four a.m. 

“Ghost. Make me a sandwich.”

The massive shepherd cocks his head at my command. 

“I’m just kidding, big guy,” I say, rubbing my hands through his thick white coat. “Lay down.” I pat my leg and his body soon drifts downward until he’s lying with his head on my lap. Before we get through the first quarter of the game, both of us are drifting off to the soft sound of overly-analytical sports announcers.

When my phone buzzes under my leg, it feels like my eyelids are sewn shut and my body is fighting off a powerful paralytic. It can’t possibly be four already. And indeed isn’t. Once my eyes adjust to the brightness of my screen, I see that it’s not even ten and rather than an alarm, it’s a call. 

I answer with my best impersonation of a put-together man and am greeted in return with a tone of voice like the world is coming to an end. Worse than that, because the world coming to an end doesn’t sound like that terrible of a thing on a night like this one. 

“I’m calling about Uncle Benjen,” speaks my cousin, somber as a ghost. “Something happened. He just died. He’s dead, Jon.”

“What?” I ask in a daze, like I’ve awoken in another dimension, or maybe I never woke up at all and this is part of some abhorrent nightmare that feels real but really I’m just sleep walking and talking to the fridge. 

“He had an aneurysm in his brain. He collapsed at the shop this morning. I’m driving to Robb’s now. Sansa’s already there. You’re coming up right?”

“Coming up?” Yes. This is most certainly a nightmare, but the longer I listen to Arya’s voice, the more I come to realize that this is real life. This is really happening. 

“For the funeral.”

“When is it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know shit. I just know he’s fucking dead and it’s the middle of the fucking night and I’m driving my ass hundreds of miles across this stupid country because Benjen’s brain fucking broke. Just tell me I’m at least going to see you while I’m in that hell hole.”

“He’s dead?”

“Yes, Jon! He’s dead! Like actually fucking dead!”

She’s crying. Arya’s crying. Not since her mother died have I ever even seen her eyes water, but she’s crying on the phone right now while the sound of sparse traffic whirs in the background. 

“I can’t go.”

“Fuck yourself, Jon. And when you’re done, pack some shit and get your ass to Oregon.”

“I can’t go.” I’m standing now, pacing really, and Ghost is staring up at me like I’m about to lose my mind and maybe he’s right. 

“Why not?”

“You know why not.”

“Oh, fuck that.”

I move my phone from my ear to groan miserably into my palm. 

An hour later, there’s a knock on my front door and I finally stop pacing. I run six miles before sunrise every morning and I’ve still managed to pace my tiny living room so much that sweat is rolling down the side of my face and dampening my hair. I pull the door open and standing on my porch is a tall, slender woman wearing sweat pants and a look of worry and sleep deprivation. 

“Hi. How are you?” I say like it’s any old day. 

“How are _you_?” replies Ygritte impatiently, not waiting for an invitation before she’s sidestepping past me into the house. “Where’s the body?”

“I said someone died, not that I killed someone.”

“Well it was a little hard to hear you on the phone what with me being half asleep and all.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I called you.”

She whips around to give me a pointed look. “Yes you do. You called me because you wanted me to be here, so I’m here, because that’s what you do when you’re in a relationship.”

Disregarding the ‘R’ word, I tell her what’s happened, that my uncle passed away, and while I loved him more than I could ever accurately express, the words feel trivial coming out of my mouth, like I shouldn’t be as upset about it as I am. I find myself working hard to justify my emotions. “He was always there for me, and no matter what I did, he was never disappointed in me. He always thought I was a better person than I was. He gave me my first job at his auto shop fixing cars when I was in high school even though he never trusted any of my cousins anywhere near the place. He taught me how to drive. He went to my high school graduation. He’d let me sleep on his couch whenever I needed to and when shit hit the fan, he gave me the money I needed to come down here and start over. He never gave up on me. I talked to him two weeks ago. We joked about him coming down here. He wanted to go to Venice Beach. He wanted to take a shit on Trump’s star on Hollywood Boulevard.”

Once I run out of breath, Ygritte simply says “I’m sorry, Jon.”

“Yeah,” is all I say in response. 

“I think that’s the most you’ve ever spoken to me at one time.”

The sentence left her mouth softly and without inflection, but I still interpret it as a cue that I spoke too much and I turn away from her, staring instead at Ghost, because even while he’s spread out on the sofa trying to sleep through my dramatics, he’s something safe to look at. 

“Hey.” I hear Ygritte’s voice, quiet but close, and a moment later I feel her hand dip into mine, squeezing it until I look at her. She’s just about the same height as me so it’s easy to fall into her, to hold onto her and kiss her and I try desperately to keep kissing her because as long as I’m kissing her I find I’m able to keep my tears at bay. And her mouth feels cold compared to how hot I feel, but soon her tongue is as warm as I need it to be. 

She’d never been to my house before, my little 800-square foot Echo Park beauty, but she fits into my mattress like she belongs there and we fuck like we’re the only two people left in the world. But we aren’t, and after I’ve managed to drift off to sleep on sweat-stained sheets, I dream of someone else. 

Like a montage of images spinning through time, I see the same person over and over but each time in a different, familiar place. Even in my sleep my chest feels heavy when I see her unconscious in the passenger seat of an old GT, when I see her on her knees on a gravely road in the dead of night, lying in a yellow tent at the top of a hill under the stars, standing before me in a cluttered office, in a narrow alleyway, sitting beside me in a dark theater, and in my bedroom watching a TV show she’d never seen before. When I blink my eyes open, the room is still dark and I swear I can see her standing in the doorway. 

“Your name is Jon, right?”

I’d thought the voice was a figment of my imagination at first, but when I turned my head away from the TV set, she was standing right there, leaning her shoulder against the doorframe, the hall light illuminating her silhouette from behind but I could still make out her long white hair and that short blue dress with the sleeves that went down to her elbows. 

“Yeah. Hey,” I answered, no doubt with a complete deer-in-headlights look. 

The voice of my online-friend, Sam, whistled in my ear, asking “Who are you talking to?”

I pulled off my headset and dropped the Xbox controller to the floor like it was scorched metal. I was sitting on the rug, back against the bunk beds I shared with my cousin, Bran, because he was still young enough to worship me enough to parcel out a space in his bedroom for me. I can’t remember the game I’d been playing. Something with guns and shooting and killing. A game I wasn’t really good at, but Sam loved it and Bran had it. 

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you.” Dany pushed herself off the doorframe like she was going to flee, but the part of me that could never quite shake my infatuation with her wouldn’t let her go. 

“Wait. It’s okay. I’m just playing some dumb game.”

“Not interested in the party?”

I could hear music playing from the basement. I didn’t consider seven teenagers watching UFC and playing Cards Against Humanity a party, but what did I know about parties except that I hated them? So, I shrugged. 

“Can I watch you?” she asked, pointing to the television. 

When she sat down beside me, I became acutely aware of how this was the closest I’d ever been to her and probably the closest I would ever be to her, so I cherished it as best I could while granting Sam another round of trying to virtually gun each other down. He eventually won, mostly because my eyes kept wandering to where Dany’s legs were stretched out in front of her, shimmering and bare, but also because I sucked at whatever game that was. 

Every second seemed to last forever as I removed my headset once again and turned off the game, eventually turning my head to look at Dany and trying not to dwell too much on how she’d just witnessed me fail miserably, but the way she smiled so innocently back at me told me that she didn’t care at all about the game. I don’t think I realized just how big of a crush I really had on her until I saw her smile up close. 

“Do you live here?” she asked, her voice as smooth and sweet as milk chocolate and her eyes as bright and blue as the ocean on a sunny day. 

“Kind of. Sometimes I stay with my uncle. Depends.”

It was the sort of response I always expected to lead to follow-up questions, but she didn’t ask any. “I’ve been coming over a lot, but I realized I’d never really spoken to you before.”

“We had English together last year.”

This seemed to embarrass her, even though that wasn’t my intention. I was just trying to come up with anything to say so that she would stay sitting next to me longer. “We did, didn’t we? I’m sorry. I’m not good at being social. Which is why I’m not downstairs right now.”

“It’s okay. I’m not very social either.”

“You and Robb are close, though.”

“Well, he’s my cousin.”

“Do you think he’s into Margaery?” 

Margaery. Captain of the cheerleading squad and the debate team, the Vice President of the Associated Student Council, and the girl I’d helped Robb sneak out of the house the previous Saturday morning, but he would have murdered me if I told Dany that last part. 

“I think everyone likes Margaery.”

She didn’t seem to find that as funny as I meant it to be because her eyes turned down to the sliver of exposed rug between us as her fingers picked at the fibers. “Do you have a car?”

“No.”

It was then that I realized she was trying to get out of there, because her expression fell even more upon my response, but selfishly, I didn’t want her to leave to find a ride home with someone else. I asked her if she wanted to watch something and she said okay, but her eyes and fingers didn’t leave the rug until I’d found a good channel on the TV showing syndicated X-Files reruns. 

“I’ve never seen this show before,” she told me, and her eyes didn’t leave the screen for nearly two hours. 

At one point I asked her if she wanted a pillow and instead of placing it behind her back, she just held it firmly against her chest. I remember wanting so badly to be that pillow just then, but never had the thought crossed my mind to try to reach out and touch her, maybe to brush her long silvery hair behind her ear, or maybe to graze my fingers across the little blonde hairs upon her forearm. I felt it was my job that night to sit right there with my hands in my lap for as long as possible, even when my eyes felt heavy and my fantasies became more about falling into my bed to sleep than falling into my bed with –

“Dany!”

Both of our heads snapped toward the opened bedroom door to see Robb standing where Dany had been more than two hours earlier. 

“I was wondering where you were. My mom says everyone’s got to go so we’re all heading out to get some pizza. Let’s go.”

She dutifully stood and I tried not to focus too hard on how she smoothed her skirt down against the backs of her thighs. “I think I’m ready to go home.”

“I can drop you off on the way.” Robb turned his attention down to me then and asked “You want to come along?”

As much as I wanted to be dropped off at home with Dany, I knew that wasn’t what he meant, so I shook my head. He said he’d bring something back for me, though, which I was grateful for, because I was always too nervous to walk into the kitchen after dinner time and rummage through the pantry with my Aunt’s eyes boring into me like she wanted to tell me that food wasn’t for me, but out of respect for her husband’s memory, she wouldn’t actually say anything of the sort. 

They both left, and I tried not to dwell on how Robb’s arm went around Dany’s shoulders as they turned to depart. I’d wrongly thought that after his father died, his popularity would decrease, because that was precisely what happened to me after my mother passed. No one wanted to be friends with the boy who just became orphaned, but Robb was always more resilient than I, and had better luck. 

I took the pillow Dany had been pressing against her breast and pressed it to my own, tucking my face down into the fabric and taking deep breaths in, trying to figure out what that scent was. Cherry blossom perfume, I would later realize, but there was something else to it as well. Something calming and uniquely her. 

I swear I can smell it now. 

“Jon.”

The mattress shifts below me and my eyes flicker open, but this time they manage to focus on the reality before me: Ygritte, dressed and on her knees beside me. It’s slightly less dark than it was the last time I tried to open my eyes. The room is now a dark greyish blue as, outside my bedroom window, the sun slowly grows to a sliver on the horizon. Fingers caress my scalp as she speaks my name again to ensure I’m awake. 

“Jon, I’m sorry. I have to get home to shower and change before work.”

“It’s okay,” I grumble drowsily. “What time is it. I have to go to work, too.” 

“You shouldn’t go to work.”

“I have a deadline.”

“When someone dies, you get time off. That’s how the world works. No one is going to expect you to show up today. Do you want me to call your supervisor for you?”

I groan and press my face back into my pillow as Ygritte’s nails continue to skate gently across my skin. 

“Want me to come with you?” she asks. 

Lifting my head just so that I can furrow my eyebrows, I ask “Where?”

“To the funeral.”

“I’m not going.”

“What? You have to go.”

“It’s not like he’ll know if I’m there. And if he does somehow know, he’ll understand.”

She sighs and her hand leaves my hair. “Alright. Well, don’t go to work today, okay? Get some rest. I’ll come over after work if I’m ever able to leave.” 

As I listen to her leave out the front door, I feel Ghost climb up onto the bed and fall asleep beside me, I consider that if I’m able to fall back asleep myself maybe I will take the day off, but after twenty minutes of my brain showing me nothing but long silver hair, blue eyes, shimmering legs and a dark blue dress, I roll myself out of bed and head for the shower. 

* * * * *

**DANY**

Arya shows up at six in the morning and I pretend not to be annoyed that Robb hadn’t told me his sister would be staying with us during this ordeal. Despite hating every second that I’m alone with my husband, I hate it even more when there are others present to bear witness to our relationship. I’m too prideful to let on that anything could possibly be the matter with our marriage, so I have to try doubly hard to present myself as a doting wife.

“Do you want some breakfast?” I ask her once Robb has schlepped all of her luggage into the house. “I can make French toast. I got bacon at the store yesterday.” 

“That’s okay. I ate some Jack in the Box tacos a couple hours ago. I just need to crash.”

“Yeah, the guest bed still needs to be made up,” Robb replies in an awkward fashion with a look toward me, as if I had forgotten to fix the bed when I had no idea that it needed to be fixed until two minutes ago. 

“I can sleep on the couch,” Arya tries, but I know better than to fall for that one. 

“No, no. I’ll fix up the guest room for you. It won’t take long.”

As I turn toward the hall, Robb tells me with a yawn “When you’re finished, can you make some coffee?”

“Of course,” I reply and hold a supportive smile until I’m out of the room and can let my petty scowl show for all of nobody to see. 

Our home is small and dated, but it has three bedrooms and I actually find the thick carpet nice in the cold winters. Maybe it’s because I grew up poor, but I never understood the contempt for carpeting. The feel of the soft fibers under my bare feet is the only pleasant part about making the guest bed and de-cluttering the room enough to not be embarrassed by another person existing among our crap. 

The walls are thin as well, which helps heat from the furnace warm the home quickly, but it also means I can hear the entirety of Robb’s conversation with his sister from the living room while I work. The boring chit chat between not-so-close siblings may as well be a woodchipper in my brain that desperately needs another three hours of sleep at least. But once I’ve finished and I’m standing in the doorway to do a final check of the guest room’s appearance, I hear Arya’s voice speak a name I haven’t heard spoken aloud in quite some time. 

“I called Jon last night, so hopefully he’s on his way up also.”

“You called Jon?” Robb asked and the name on his lips sounds even more foreign. I don’t think I’ve heard him say that name since Sansa’s wedding two years ago while bickering with the bride over their cousin’s non-appearance. 

“Well I made the educated assumption that you hadn’t call him, so yeah, I called him.”

“And he said he’s coming?”

“No. He said he’s not coming.”

I find that my hand has been clutched around the doorframe and my fingers have been digging into the wood so hard my nails leave dents in the white paint. My eyes are still on the guest bed, but it isn’t the guest bed that appears to my vision. Rather, I see that bunk bed Jon used to share with Robb’s little brother once upon a time, back when I’d like to say things were simpler, but things had never been simple. Not with me and Robb. Not with Jon. Not with anything about my entire life. Everything always had to be overwhelmingly confusing and impossibly difficult. 

I’d been hoping to spend time with Robb alone, back when we’d first started going out during my junior year of high school. He was a catch. A wrestling star, straight A student, and arguably the most handsome young man in all of the greater Eugene area, but even by normal standards, Robb was beautiful. More than that, he was charming. He always knew exactly what to say in every scenario, but nothing ever came off as disingenuous. We’d sat next to each other in Chemistry and he’d help me with my classwork because I knew nothing about Chemistry. During lectures he would pass me notes with suggestive jokes about what fun we could have if we were ever alone together. Eventually it was all I wanted to be alone with Robb, but even after I became his unofficial girlfriend we were never really alone together longer than it would take for him to fuck me, which never lasted very long at all. 

When I showed up to his house, having taken the bus all the way there once I’d gotten the text that his mom said it was okay to have someone over, there were already two of his wrestling buddies eating nachos with him in front of the basement television. Not fifteen minutes later, another of his teammates showed up, a female, bringing along a few of her also-female friends, girls I’d known since Kindergarten only because I never forgot about the girls who refused to let me play with them at recess because my hair was weird and my parents were dead and my brother went to prison for selling drugs. 

Margaery – I’ll never forget that slut – crawled into Robb’s lap after two bottles of hard lemonade, but I didn’t give up on the night until I realized Robb wasn’t going to push her off of him. He was dead to me then and I had decided never to speak to him again, because I was better than the girl he thought I was, who would see him flirt with another woman and stick around. 

But, I had nowhere to go. I’d promised my uncle I wouldn’t take the bus after dark, but truthfully, I would have gone back on my word if I had the money for it. I think I ended up sitting in the downstairs bathroom for twenty minutes trying to muster up the courage to demand that Robb drive me home. Somehow, though, that courage never found me, and I instead began to wander the house. Robb’s mother was home but he’d said she was up in the converted attic doing work and Robb’s younger siblings were all in the living room watching a Disney channel movie. 

Eventually I came upon a second-floor bedroom, door opened and only the light from a television set emitting from it. I peaked my head in and saw a familiar body seated on the floor in front of a small flat screen, his back leaned against the side of the bottom bunk of a bunk bed. Though I’d never spoken one word to this boy before, I knew of him through stories Robb would sometimes share that involved his favorite, and only, cousin. Unlike almost everyone else in this town my age, he didn’t go to the same school as me until ninth grade, but I remember that first day of high school when a new face showed up among the small sea of frustratingly familiar ones. Everyone knew he was related to Robb but he really didn’t look much like his cousin besides the curls of their hair. Differently colored, though. Jon’s was black where Robb’s was a dark auburn. Jon’s eyes were grey where Robb’s were blue. Jon was slightly shorter but his shoulders broader. 

The biggest difference between Robb Stark and Jon Snow, though, was that Jon always seemed to look absolutely miserable. In a way, I envied that he was strong enough not to care that he looked so miserable. It may have rendered him supremely unapproachable by nearly all of the student body population, but I always managed to be supremely unapproachable too, despite my active effort to conceal my own misery. 

Jon didn’t look miserable just then, though, as he sat on the floor pressing buttons on a game controller, expression twisted in concentration at the TV. Because of this, I felt it okay to say something. I can’t remember what I said, though. Something vapid like “Your name is Jon, right?” as if I wasn’t sure. 

He looked up at me quickly, like I’d startled him and I realized that I had most likely screwed up his game by talking to him, but before I could flee, he asked me if I wanted to play. I’d never enjoyed video games, unless you count the Sims, so I shook my head. I didn’t want to leave, though. I didn’t want to just keep wandering the house and I would rather watch Disney channel movies with three children than attempt to walk all the way home. 

“Do you mind if I sit and watch you?”

Even when he nodded, I was hesitant to sit beside him, but as soon as I did, I felt a calmness wash over me that was enough to make me forget about all the things miserable guys sometimes do to miserable girls when they’re alone in rooms with them. I think he felt self-conscious about me watching him play his game, though, because the next time he died or failed or whatever, he shut the system off. I thought he might ask me to leave, so I started asking him questions instead, but I can’t remember what any of them were, only that I eventually asked him if he thought Robb was interested in Margaery, which he more or less indicated in the affirmative. I think I let my miserable show then. I think I even asked if he could take me home, but for some reason, he couldn’t. 

After that, Jon seemed eager to cheer me up, offering to watch hours of mindless television with me. I remember he gave me one of the pillows off the bottom bunk when I began to shiver because I wasn’t smart enough to grab my jacket before I fled the basement. It wasn’t perfect, but it warmed me up enough so that I began to feel comfortable and soon I felt really comfortable, like even if Robb forgot all about me, I could just stay in that room with Jon hugging his pillow for warmth until the sun came up and I could walk home without worrying about getting lost or attacked. I began to feel weary, but somehow the thought of falling asleep beside Jon didn’t frighten me like it would if it were anyone else, even if it were Robb. 

But then Robb did find me, and finally I was going to be able to go home. I was so relieved that he hadn’t actually forgotten about me that when he put his arm around me, the warmth negated all of the negative feelings I had toward him and his contact with Margaery. 

I blink rapidly to expel the pool of tears building up in my eyes and after the fluid drains in streaks down my cheeks I find I’m back to looking at the guest room inside the house Robb bought us just a few months before our wedding. There are always so many reasons to cry nowadays, but nothing affects me more than remembering how fucking stupid I was that I would put up with so much for so little in return. If I’d had one ounce of self-respect back then, perhaps my life would have turned out completely different. Maybe it would have turned out the way it always should have. But the one thing I’ve always lacked more than courage, is self-respect. 

As I hear Robb calling me from the kitchen – something about how to use the coffee machine we’ve owned since our wedding – I quickly dry my face with the sleeves of my shirt and swallow down any other memories that may threaten to tear me apart.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic contains a lot of angst, mature/triggering themes (including death/loss and domestic abuse), and characters who are misguided, depressed and flawed. I hope you enjoy this work, but if you do not, I understand and respect that. If at any point this work is not to your liking, I will not be offended if you choose to stop reading. I have rated this fic "Mature" for a reason. To reiterate: It's just a story. I wrote it for my own personal enjoyment and creative growth and do not expect it to appeal to all readers. Enjoy, or don't. No pressure.

**DANY**

For the rest of junior year, my life became all about trying to get as much attention from Robb as possible. His short attention span coupled with his need to never be the only person in a room meant that every second I wasn’t with him, I knew he was with someone else, and sometimes that someone else was Margaery. I knew that because toward the end of the school year, we’d had a month long fight about how he wasn’t sure if he wanted to be exclusive with me because of his attraction to her. 

But, Margaery’s parents’ divorce was final by the end of the summer and her mom whisked her off to Massachusetts to live with her new, rich boyfriend and that pretty much ended the conflict between me and Robb because he couldn’t very well date a girl who was thousands of miles away, swimming in a pool of New England prep-boys. 

Meanwhile, I spent almost every day that summer with Robb, but the wounds of Robb’s affection for another cut deep enough that I no longer saw him as my sun and my stars. He called me his girlfriend, but the lust and admiration I had felt for him had dissipated. I still remember that first week of the Summer break when we were on our way to the theater for a movie and Robb spontaneously insisted that Jon join us. I wasn’t even mad. Once I had wanted Jon’s approval because I was so smitten by his cousin, but that too transformed into me simply wanting Jon to like me for me. 

And going to the movies with Robb and Jon quickly became my favorite thing to do. We would see the worst ones that no one else went to and those two boys always had the most hilarious things to say. Eventually, I caught on to their sense of humor and soon we would have our own personal Mystery Science Theater 3000 party every week and then we’d walk back to Robb’s house along the quarry and he would bet Jon money that he couldn’t catch a ground squirrel. He did once, but then it turned out to be a vole and Robb made him give the money back.

By August I didn’t even care to see Robb unless Jon was there too. If I ever did, I’d feel disappointed. And as the weather began to turn and the air began to feel less like freedom and simple pleasures and more like impending responsibility and dread, the three of us went to our last movie before we would have to alter our schedules to accommodate school and homework and part-time jobs. 

We saw Piranha 3D and the theater was fuller than we were used to. I made it known that I was nervous about potentially having to sit right next to a stranger, so I ended up sitting between Robb and Jon. 

Despite all the time we’d been spending together, it was the first time since that night I startled Jon away from his video game that I had simply sat beside him. As not to disturb the crowd, Jon would lean over and whisper his jokes into my ear and I found myself shivering each time he’d do so, but not because I was cold. At first, after a silent snicker, I would telephone the joke to Robb, but eventually I liked the idea of sharing jokes between Jon and only Jon. 

Even with Robb’s arm securely around my shoulders, I found myself trying to inch closer to Jon and if I was lucky, I would get close enough to smell whatever it is he was wearing – a cologne or deodorant that still stops me in my tracks if I even encounter it in the real world, but I still have yet to discover exactly what that fragrance is. 

I didn’t understand Jon’s jokes after a while because I had been losing track of the movie, but still I would smile and blush each time his warm breath touched my ear. I was reliving that sensation I had sitting next to Robb in class as he passed suggestive notes to me, but this time with his cousin in a dark movie theater. 

“Are you okay?” Robb had asked me at one point, probably because of the anxious expression I wore as I came to terms with this budding infatuation with my boyfriend’s surrogate brother and best friend. I simply gave him a smile, nod and a quick peck on the lips, but as soon as his attention was immersed back into the movie, I found my hand wandering underneath the narrow armrest that was all that separated my body from Jon’s. 

Cold fingers wrap around my arm and I flinch. 

“Are you okay?” Robb asks me with discontent in his tone. 

I realize then that I’d been staring at the floor to ceiling display of urns so long that my feet have nearly fallen asleep. Pulling my arm from my husband’s grasp, I answer that I’m fine. 

“Alright, well we’re almost done here and then we’re going to go look at the plot next to my grandfather’s.”

“I thought he was going to be buried next to your Aunt.”

“It’s the same family plot. I don’t think it matters who’s skeleton he’s immediately next to.”

“Maybe it does.”

“What, are you religious now, Dany? Why don’t you head out to the car. I’ll be out there in like, ten minutes. God, this place gives me the fucking creeps.” With a shake of his head and an irritated sigh, Robb leaves me and heads back into the office where Sansa and her husband still are, talking costs with the funeral home director. 

He’s in a bad mood, I can tell, and it isn’t just about Benjen’s death. It’s about the money. He’s the oldest Stark left living and feels obligated to put as much money into it as possible so that his younger siblings won’t feel the burden. Sansa’s still paying off her wedding and Arya has been working odd-jobs to pull herself out from under a mountain of student loan debt. Bran and Rickon are still in school, soon to be in the same boat. While Robb and I aren’t well off by any means, we’re the most logical choice to pony up for family expenses. He is, I should say. I don’t make any money, unless you count the stipend Robb gives me out of his paycheck for grocery shopping and paying the bills. I remember the nearly three-thousand dollars I’ve managed to save up in my secret checking account and feel guilty. 

Out on the front porch of the funeral home, Arya sucks on a cigarette like it’s medicinal. Of all the Starks, she looks the most like Jon with her dark hair and grey eyes and brooding nature, which is one reason I always feel so uncomfortable around her. Of all the Starks – now that Benjen has passed – she is also the only one who still talks regularly with Jon, which is the other reason for my discomfort. 

“Want one?” she asks me gruffly, showing me her pack of Marlboro Reds. 

I shake my head and tug my sweater tighter around me as I shiver in the biting November air. 

“Hope this means we won’t all have to get together for Thanksgiving,” the petite twenty-four-year-old jokes dryly. “Should cancel out Christmas also.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I tell her. “And I’m sorry I haven’t said that until now.”

She flicks ash into a flower pot on the porch step. “It’s your loss too, isn’t it? You’re one of us, Mrs. Daenerys Stark.”

I smile to keep myself from cringing. I never wanted to be a Stark, but Robb insisted so heavily that I take his name and eventually I grew tired of fighting it. He always wins in the end. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a Stark. Quite the opposite actually. I figure everyone wants to be a Stark at one point or another, but I was always acutely aware that no one ever wished to be a Targaryen. For so long I had romanticized the idea of the boy from the family everyone envied loving the girl from the family everyone looked down upon that changing my name seemed to defeat the purpose. I think that the day I filed the documents for the legal name change was the day I realized how big of a mistake I had made by marrying Robb. And that was almost eight years ago. 

“Are Bran and Rickon coming?” I ask, though that isn’t at all what I want to know. 

She shakes her head and returns her cigarette to her lips without a word. 

“How many people will be coming to the reception?” 

“Don’t know. Ask Sansa. She’s the one who knows all that shit.” She tamps her cigarette out on the porch railing before flicking it into the garden. “But that’s not what you want to ask me, is it? You want to ask me if Jon’s going to be there.”

I open my mouth to object, but my throat is suddenly frozen. 

“Don’t worry,” Arya speaks as she descends the stairs. “Jon would rather miss his own beloved uncle’s funeral than make you feel uncomfortable.” 

My body reacts like I’ve been struck by an electrical pulse, like my heart has stopped despite the hard, persistent thudding against my chest. Would he really not show up? Would he really stay away because of me?

* * * * *

**JON**

Ghost lounges in the torn-up back yard behind the Redondo Beach house the company I work for is flipping, staring at me like he knows I should be taking Ygritte’s advice and request a leave of absence, but manual labor seems to be taking my mind off of yet another vacancy left in my heart and there is a lot of labor to be done. Nearly half of the house had to be stripped to the studs due to mold. Electrical and plumbing need to be installed, the gas line needs to be connected, walls put up and insulation stuffed within them, windows cut and framed, and same with the doors. And that’s just to get it looking like a house again. Then, we’ll have to lay down new flooring, paint the walls, hang the fixtures, move in appliances, hammer in the moldings and hang some pretty pictures on the walls until no one can tell that it used to be a moldy, termite-infested rat trap. Sometimes I wonder if it would just be easier to tear the whole thing down and start from scratch, but it’s the bones of the house that contain its soul, and a house without a soul is just wood and paint. 

Since lunch I’ve received three missed calls from Arya and a few texts from Sansa about needing an accurate headcount. My phone is still periodically buzzing in my pocket but I’m too busy hammering long nails into thick roofing shingles. 

Why did he have to die? If anyone could have conquered the Stark family curse of dying before their time, it was Benjen, but a technicality whiped him off the board before he hit fifty. I would like to see him again, even if only to stare down at his lifeless body, lying among pillows and frills in a shiny wooden box while all the living people whisper about me behind my back. I’d still hear every word, even if I can’t hear it in their voices. 

“It still makes me sick to think of what he did to that poor girl,” they would whisper to each other. 

“And to his own cousin no less.”

“It was jealousy. Had to have been.”

“How he can even show his face here is beyond me.”

“How he could even think it okay to show his face is even more troubling.”

“And the Starks were always so good to him. They didn’t have to take him into their home like they did.”

“He might have the blood of his uncles, but he has the morality of his father, whoever that was.”

“He’s better off in Los Angeles.”

“He’s better off alone.”

Sweat, or maybe tears, fall from the tip of my nose and onto the hand that grips the hammer. It slips as I swing it down and instead of nail, the blunt hunk of steal collides down onto my left hand. The last thing I hear before all the sound in the world stops is that of bones cracking. 

For what feels like hours I can’t move or speak or even think a coherent thought until suddenly all of my sense come crashing back to me and I’m feeling everything all at once. Anger and pain and fear and sorrow and guilt and love. But mostly anger. Anger at myself for being so stupid as to injure myself in the first place, for coming to work at all instead of listening to Ygritte, for Benjen dying and forcing me to accept that if I ever want to see him again I’ll have to go back to the place I swore I’d never again set foot in, for ever thinking that I could get what I wanted without suffering incomprehensible consequences, for ever allowing myself to fall for my cousin’s girlfriend. 

Every negative thing in my life has been as a result of that decision. The decision to let myself feel something for someone else. The decision to let her sit there in my bedroom holding my pillow and watching X-Files with me. The decision to let her finger trace circles against the back of my hand during that stupid fucking movie, for turning over my palm so that she could slide hers against it, for lacing my fingers with hers and rubbing my thumb against the soft skin. I couldn’t even turn my head to look at her as I did it. My eyes were glued to the movie screen, but I wasn’t watching a thing. It was the happiest I’d ever felt. And then, as Dany walked ahead of us on our way back home, Robb just had to show me all of the dirty pictures Margaery had sent him while his phone was turned off in the theater. He just had to show them to me, and he just had to smirk and nudge my arm like he always would. 

I watched Dany’s hair wave in the gentle breeze and the hem of a dress so similar to the ones she always wore bounce against the backs of her thighs. I made a mistake then, not in thinking that she deserved better than Robb, but in thinking I was better than Robb – that I deserved her.

That night, as I lay in the bottom bunk of Bran’s bed listening to his soft snoring above me, I texted Dany. Not the usual sort of thing I would text her – phrases that began with “Robb wants to know. . .,” “Are you and Robb. . .,” and “Robb said that. . .” Instead, I texted her the ever ominous _“Hey,”_ and she replied not even a minute later with an even more controversial _“Hey (:”_

How fitting that now, as I am considering venturing into hostile territory where I would see Dany and Robb again, that I should find myself accidently smashing the very hand that dared to touch her that day, the very hand that helped to type out that simple three-letter word into my flip phone just a few hours later and all the other words I would text her until I couldn’t keep my eyes open long enough to finish a text. 

I pop some Advil and drive in agony to drop Ghost off at home before going to the Emergency Room. Broken index finger as well as multiple fractures to the hand. I’m put in a brace and sent home with a week’s worth of hydrocodone that I won’t take, because I prefer the pain to feeling nothing at all. When I get home, I just barely have enough energy to fix Ghost’s dinner before I’m passing out on the couch. 

Falling asleep in the daytime and waking up in the dark always fucks me up, but it’s even more disorienting when I’m startled awake, and when my body jerks awake to the sound of knocking at my front door, I just about roll right onto the carpet. Walking feels weird, like the gravity has changed and my vision ripples like I’m underwater. Nothing feels real. 

“What happened?” Ygritte asks me once she’s let herself in, quick to interrogate me about the state of my hand. “How did you do that?”

“Well. . . I went to work.”

 _“Jon.”_ She makes me sit down at the kitchen table while she digs through my freezer. “Elevate it, Jon. You’ve got to elevate it.” I bunch my collection of unopened mail into a pile and rest my broken hand on top of it. Ygritte soon comes back and places a frozen bag of mixed vegetables I completely forgot existed atop the brace. 

“Well, at least now you really can’t go back to work,” she says with a sigh, sitting down across from me. 

“I can still –”

_”Jon.”_

“Ygritte.”

She sighs once more. “Why don’t you want to go to the funeral? Is it your family? Because everyone has problems with their family, but death trumps drama.”

“Not with my family.”

“I’m sure that’s not the case.”

“You can’t be sure. You have no idea what’s going on.”

“Then tell me,” she insists, exasperated. 

“No,” I state, pointedly. I sigh, squeezing my eyes shut and trying to remember that Ygritte is just trying to help me, one of the only people I have left who actually cares if I’m doing what’s best for me and no matter how frustrating it is sometimes, I can’t let myself lose that. “Look, I just can’t talk about it, okay?”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t. I just can’t.”

“Just tell me what happened. I’m not going to judge you, Jon.”

“I don’t care if you judge me. In fact, you should judge me. I’m a fucking piece of shit. But I can’t talk about it because, literally, I cannot speak the words. I’m physically unable to breathe life back into the memories that haunt me on a daily basis. I lost. . .” I bring my good hand up to my face, rubbing my fingers into my eyelids as if it would keep me from crying “. . . everything. But no matter how shitty I feel, I know that it’s nothing compared to the pain I inflicted on the people I loved the most. That’s why I can’t talk about it. That’s why I can’t go back. Because I _did_ something, and now I don’t get to just go back.”

It takes a minute for Ygritte to respond, but eventually she looks me in the eye and says “You said that you didn’t want to make your uncle’s funeral about you, but by not going, that’s exactly what you’re doing. Your saying that whatever you did is more important than his life, his legacy, and his love for you. You need to go and you need to make sure that everything is about him, and if others try to make it about you being there then that’s their fault. That’s their bad, not yours.”

It takes me more than a minute just to process the information, but before I can make a response – some half assed attempt at disagreeing – my phone vibrates loudly against the wood table top. I turn it over with my good hand and see that it’s yet another call from Arya. I don’t know why – maybe to buy some more time – but I answer. 

Listening to the voice of my younger cousin telling me how badly she wishes to see me while looking at Ygritte’s all-knowing eyes, I find my mouth speaking the exact opposite of what I want to say. 

“I’ll be there. I’ll start out tomorrow. I’ll see you soon.” But before hanging up, I add “Arya. . . make sure she knows I’m coming, okay? I don’t want to surprise her.”

Ygritte grants me a small smile after I hang up, but then she stands and collects her purse. 

“Are you leaving?” I ask. 

“Yeah. I’ve got another early morning tomorrow.”

“Oh.”

“And I think you were right about us.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t think a real relationship would be very good for us right now. I don’t think you’re ready for that. I don’t think you’re ready for me.”

Once she’s walked out of my house, two emotions battle for dominance. Sadness that she’s gone and relief that she’s finally given up on me. Even Ghost, sitting on the linoleum floor, looks at me like he doesn’t know what to make of me. 

“Ghost. Don’t look at me,” I command, and in response, he ducks his head and lays his paw across his snout as if to cover his eyes. 

I smile and tell him he’s a good boy before giving my leg a pat to let him know that if he rests his head on my lap, I’ll give him a long scratch behind the ear. 

* * * * *

**DANY**

Sansa came over after lunch time with a notebook full of information on the funeral and the reception afterward and I sit to the side while she and Robb bicker over how much all of this will cost. The casket is a couple thousand. The flowers a few hundred. The caterer Sansa hired will be pricey as well since the whole town is sure to turn up because they won’t be able to pass up free food and the chance to poke around in another person’s home. I hold my tongue as Robb vetoes the professional cleaning service, stating that we – meaning me – will take care of getting the house and yard in shape. I almost consider taking up smoking just to have an excuse to leave the house every now and again like Arya does, slinking out when things are at their most tedious. 

When she slides back into the conversation smelling heavily of tobacco and Victoria Secret perfume, we – meaning Robb and Sansa – are discussing who will speak at the funeral. Who will stand up in front of Benjen’s corpse and talk about how hilarious it was when he locked himself out of his own shop and nearly got arrested breaking into it. 

“Arya, are you going to want to say a few words?” Sansa asks her younger sister. 

“I don’t know what I would say.”

“So, that’s a no?”

“That’s an I don’t know.”

Sansa heaves a sigh. “I’ll allocate a couple of minutes for you in case you change your mind.”

“How gracious of you,” Arya replies with a bitter smile. “You may want to allocate a couple of minutes for our dear cousin as well, just in case.”

I had gotten so used to not reacting to things that, though my shock at Arya’s insinuation, my body remains completely still and my head never turns to glance questioningly at the young woman. Robb is not so stoic, though. He eyes his sister with a furrowed brow. 

“I thought you said he wasn’t coming.”

“I never said he wasn’t coming. I said that he said he wasn’t coming.”

“So is he coming or is he not coming?” Sansa asks, exasperated. 

“I talked to him last night and he said he’s coming. Should be driving up now. Will likely get here some time tomorrow.” There’s an awkward silence that fills the room, or maybe it’s just that I can’t hear anything anymore what with the ringing in my ears. However, I do hear Arya’s sarcastic tone add “Don’t worry. I’m sure he’s getting a hotel.”

Sansa looks back down at her notebook and scribbles something down. “I’ll allocate a few minutes for Jon as well, then.” She doesn’t hate Jon the way that Robb does, but she’s always worshipped Robb and families tend to choose sides when people have such an explosive falling out. Arya clearly chose Jon. I think that Benjen did, too, even if he was much more subtle about it. 

The next time my eyes find Arya, she’s staring at me with that unreadable, brooding expression that I grew so accustomed to seeing on Jon’s face. They really are so much alike, which is why I convince myself Jon despises me just as much as Arya does. 

By the time night falls, Robb and I have yet to discuss Jon’s impending presence among us and I really thought that that discussion would never happen, since Jon’s name is much too sour on Robb’s tongue. It had been so long since we talked about Jon that it feels like a lifetime ago, but the tension of his existence has been ever present as a barrier between us. I suppose I should have seen it coming when all of a sudden, after months of celibacy between us, Robb pulls me against him in bed, the lights off and the door shut, and slides his hand into my sweat pants and his tongue into my mouth. 

“What are you doing?” I whisper against his mouth, pressing my head back against the pillow to gain every millimeter I can away from my husband’s hungry mouth. “Your sister is sleeping in the next room. You know how thin the walls are.”

“So what? We’ll be quiet.”

“Robb. . .”

His mouth attaches to my neck like a suction and his hand that was inside my pants is now pushing them down my hips. 

“I’m tired, Robb. . .”

“You’re so beautiful,” he breathes hot against my neck. “Just as beautiful as when we were young.”

When we were young. . . I’m only twenty-eight. Am I really that old now? 

When he’s manages to get my pants down and push my knees apart, he lifts his head to look down at me. “You know what I want more than anything?”

Slowly, I nod. 

“Not just a baby, Dany. Your baby. Yours and mine. Don’t you want that?”

I swallow hard and then force another nod. He doesn’t try to kiss me again, which I appreciate, but the way he assaults my neck and collarbone eventually stings. Not so much so as when he pushes himself inside of me, though. The funny thing is – in a very not-funny way – the only reason I have a hard time keeping quiet is because of how much discomfort I’m in. When I enjoy it – and I can’t remember the last time I did – I find it almost second-nature to remain perfectly silent. 

Obviously, he cums inside of me. He’s trying to get me pregnant again, but I’ve been preparing for the eventual return of his lust for me by staying religious with my birth control pills. That slip up less than a year ago put the fear of God into me. Never again have I skipped a pill, even when I go months and months without even the slightest touch from my husband. 

When he’s finally rolled off of me, I turn my back to him. It isn’t just out of contempt, though there is definitely some of that, but also because Robb will sometimes rub my back after he fucks me. It’s pretty much the only part I look forward to, and indeed, his hand eventually finds its way under my shirt and smooths the skin, up and down my spine. 

Just as I think I’m going to drift off to sleep, Robb stops the movement of his hand and says in a soft yet serious tone “I don’t want you to talk to him, Dany.”

“Who?” I ask sleepily. 

“You know who. I don’t want you talking to him.”

My eyes squint as the contempt grows more dominant in my mood. “Robb –”

“I don’t want you talking to Jon, okay?”

I shake my head at his immaturity, but soon mutter “Okay.”

His hand leaves my shirt and I feel him turn over onto his other side and I find myself lying in bed for hours, motionless and leaking semen, sore and thinking about Jon.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic contains a lot of angst, mature/triggering themes (including death/loss and domestic abuse), and characters who are misguided, depressed and flawed. I hope you enjoy this work, but if you do not, I understand and respect that. If at any point this work is not to your liking, I will not be offended if you choose to stop reading. I have rated this fic "Mature" for a reason. To reiterate: It's just a story. I wrote it for my own personal enjoyment and creative growth and do not expect it to appeal to all readers. Enjoy, or don't. No pressure.

**JON**

For the longest time I told myself that what Dany and I were doing was no big deal. We were just friends and why wouldn’t Robb want his girlfriend and his best friend to also be friends? The three of us would still hang out. Bowling, ice skating, even some hiking. Robb thought that he was bringing us both out of our shells, but the only reason I looked forward to our outings was because Dany would be there. 

Robb was always more active with school and sports and everything else than me and Dany, so sometimes the two of us would hang out without him, but even that didn’t feel like a betrayal at the time. We never did anything. We never even held hands again since that movie. She would watch me play video games against Sam until she understood the rules and became a better competitor against him than me. I would watch her play the Sims until I developed an affinity for constructing virtual mansions in the game-towns for her fictional families to live in. We had our own inside jokes – sometimes consisting of a single funny look at a specific time. 

The only times I would feel like I was truly sidling the line between friendship and betrayal would be when the clock read after midnight and we’d still be texting each other, because after midnight is when the brain likes to dig up all the thoughts and emotions it was too careful to reveal during the day. I would write that I couldn’t wait to see her at school the next day, which eventually turned into _“I miss you”_ and one night she confessed to me that she was in love with the way I smelled. I laughed at that, and one day surprised her by giving her a sweatshirt I’d worn every day for a week. I saw it as another inside joke at first, until that night when she texted me that she was hugging it against herself under the covers of her bed. 

Robb wasn’t the only one I was betraying with these texts, either. Every night that I didn’t tell Dany that Robb was cheating on her made me feel sick, but my loyalties to him weren’t so easily severed. Besides, I didn’t want her breaking up with him because he was flirting around. I wanted her to break up with him because she wanted to be with me. 

It didn’t end up mattering, because one day she found out on her own when she happened to glance at Robb’s phone. 

For a week I had to listen to Robb move between badmouthing Dany for exploding on him and sobbing because he wanted her back. Meanwhile, Dany wouldn’t speak to me. She wouldn’t text me back. She wouldn’t even look at me in the halls at school. 

When I cornered her one day, she nearly shouted “Why didn’t you tell me he was hooking up with other girls?!”

“I didn’t know he was actually doing anything. I thought it was just texting shit.”

Folding her arms over her chest, she glared up at me, testing my ability to hold eye contact with her knowing full well she wished to rip them right out of my skull. “And how long were you aware that he’d been sexting _Margaery_ behind my back?”

It was already January and when I did the math in my head I knew that if I answered her honestly I probably wouldn’t make it out of the conversation alive, but I also couldn’t lie to her. Now that she knew the fundamental truth, I couldn’t keep the details hidden. 

“Since the beginning of Summer.”

My heart ached as her eyes watered. “I thought you were a good person. How could you do this to me? You made me look like an idiot. They’re all laughing at me. Everyone.” Her shoulder collided with mine hard as she left me, muttering something about hating my guts under her breath as she went. 

I thought she’d never speak to me again. Even when Robb managed enough “grand romantic gestures” to win her back, she wouldn’t look at me the same. And whenever we would end up alone together for however long it took Robb to use the restroom or pump gas at a station, she would ignore me completely. I never really figured out why she was more upset with me over Robb’s cheating than with Robb himself, but it developed in me this insidious resentment toward my cousin. The guy who had everything fucked up but I was the one suffering the irrevocable consequences. At least, they felt irrevocable for a time.

* * * * *

I wake up under starchy bed sheets atop a lumpy bed. A motel in Sausalito. No dogs allowed, but I snuck Ghost in after getting the room key and he is still fast asleep on the bed beside me. He doesn’t even awaken when I place my hand on his shoulder and stroke his thick fur. 

Arya’s texted me. 

_“Told Sansa you’d want to say a few words at the service. 11AM tomorrow. Reception at Robb’s after.”_

My guttural, distressed groan is what finally startles Ghost awake. Impulsively, I text back _“Having second thoughts.”_

She replies swiftly _“Don’t bitch out on me cuz. I’m gonna need someone to get drunk with after this shit.”_

Getting drunk does sound nice, but I can do that anywhere. I type back _“Don’t worry. I’ll be there. In a costume so no one recognizes me.”_

_“Drinks are on me if you do.”_

I smile. _”Drinks are on you regardless.”_

As soon as Ghost starts on licking the oil from my face, I know its time to shower and get back on the road. Maybe it won’t be so bad. Even as a child, Arya wasn’t afraid to fuck someone up. In her twenties now, I expect she could actually follow through on the threats.

It actually doesn’t even register in my mind what it would mean to stand in front of my family and the townspeople and talk about Benjen until I’m back on the road. No one would want to hear from me. No one would care what I have to say, but maybe Benjen would. If he were really watching, as some more optimistic people would believe, he would be proud of me. 

I could talk about how he taught me how to drive. 

“If you’re going to be working at the shop with me after school, you’re going to have to know how to operate the vehicles you’ll be working on,” he told me. 

“In that case, can I work on motorcycles?”

He had laughed at that before giving me a vehement no. “One day,” he’d said. “One day I’ll teach you how to ride a motorcycle.” I suppose now that day would never come. 

As I approach the California Oregon border, I realize that I can’t tell that story. On the surface, it’s a precious tale of how a childless uncle taught his orphaned nephew how to drive in mall parking lots on weekday nights and country roads on Sunday mornings. But to tell that story would be to mention the royal blue GT we practiced in, and to mention that car would be to reference every time I would later drive it to work, to school and into the city as well as all those times I was finally able to drive Dany home when she and Robb would get into a fight or when Robb was simply too busy and/or lazy to drive her himself. 

To tell that story would be to tell all the stories that followed, because if Benjen had never taught me how to drive, he never would have given me his GT, and if he had never given me his GT, it never would have crashed, and if it had never crashed, everything would be different. 

The miles on the highway signs beside “Eugene” grow smaller and smaller and my stomach begins to feel sicker and sicker. I still haven’t come up with what I might say during Benjen’s service and my mind is only becoming more and more useless. I pull over and puke my guts out next to the forty-mile sign. Nine years I’d been hiding out in a city of millions, many hundreds of miles standing in between me and her, but now I’m so close to her that I swear I feel her in the atmosphere. Nine years since I’ve laid eyes on her but it feels like just yesterday that I was being handcuffed and shoved into the backseat of a cop car, watching through the window as paramedics wheeled her into an ambulance. The last memory I have of her, still as fresh in my mind as all the others: the first time she smiled at me, the first time she held my hand and the first time I lost her trust. 

We would still hang out together, the three of us, but it wasn’t the same. Before, while it was clear that Dany was with Robb, it was also clear than she and I were friends, but after getting back together with Robb, Dany didn’t feel like my friend anymore. There was a luster than had disappeared from her eyes each time I would say something to her or try to make a joke. She suddenly didn’t find me funny anymore. I was of absolutely no interest to her. But sometimes. . . sometimes I was still of use to her. 

She had called me, frustration in her voice, late one weekend evening asking me if I would pick her up from a house ten miles away from her own. I realize from the background sounds through the phone that there’s a party going on and I remember Robb leaving a couple of hours ago for a party of one of our school’s star baseball players. 

“Isn’t Robb there with you?” I ask after pausing my video game. 

“He’s here, but he is most certainly not _with_ me!” she replies angrily, having to shout over the EDM music blaring through the phone. “Can you please come get me, Jon? I seriously have no one else to call. I’m sorry.”

The sincerity at which she apologizes to me throws me off guard. I’d given her rides recently where she wouldn’t even look in my direction let alone apologize for inconveniencing me. She knew that I would drop everything and drive over there without need for a ‘please,’ but she bestowed one upon me anyway. 

She’d waited on the front lawn in front of a large home emitting colorful lights and loud noises from inside and was shivering in faux-leather boots that still left the middle of her legs exposed under another of her short blue dresses. Just as had become the usual, she didn’t speak to me the whole twenty-minute drive even though I asked her if something had happened twice. I was starting to grow angry, but only at myself for thinking that maybe tonight she would finally let me back in. 

But, when I stopped at the curb in front of her small bungalow by one of the city link bus stops, she didn’t immediately get out. She sat there, hugging her light jacket tightly around her torso, suggesting that she was cold but I’d had the heater on the whole drive.

But, she still wouldn’t speak either, or look at me. She simply sat there, looking out in front of her at the foggy windshield like we were still moving. 

“Do you think we could ever be friends again?” I ended up asking her, something I’d wanted to ask her for a month, but couldn’t muster the courage. 

It took her a minute, but eventually she shook her head and I thought that was it. That was the end of everything between us. A nearly four-year long crush would end like this – a stupid mistake made by a stupid idiot boy that just happened to be me. 

I thought that until she finally turned to look me in the eyes, and with much sadness asked “How could you not tell me?”

I was thrown again. I’d been trying to come up with a speech that would explain my deceit for so long that the words had turned to mush before they could travel from my brain to my mouth. “I don’t know,” I end up saying. “But I won’t do it again.”

She scoffed. “Just like Robb won’t flirt with other girls again.”

“You forgave him. Why can’t you forgive me?”

Again, her head shook, and she seemed to hug herself tighter, shoulders hunching. “The difference between you and Robb is that I knew from the start that I couldn’t trust him, but I thought that I could trust you. I did trust you and then it turned out you were lying to me the whole time. You called me your friend but you were working against me. You say it won’t happen again, but it will because you’re always going to be on his side. And you know what, Jon? At least he’s passionate about me. At least he fights for me after he fucks up. At least he wants me.”

That’s when she turns and bolts from the car, but by that point my brain had switched back on and I was bolting from my door as well. 

“Dany!” I called out, jogging after her. 

She turned back to me, surprised. 

“I’m sorry, alright?” I repeated, raising my voice to a normal volume which felt loud in comparison. “I hurt you, but I didn’t mean to. I wanted to tell you, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t –”

“Because you’re on his side!”

“No! Maybe. I just couldn’t, okay? If I had told you, he would have killed me, but not before telling his mom to kick me out of the house and she would do it. You _know_ she would do it. But. . .” I’d let out a sigh, voice going back to my normal quiet. “But it wasn’t just that. Actually, it wasn’t even mostly that. It was mostly because you already knew. You may not have had proof, but you knew, and I thought that one day you would finally realize that you’re so much better than him and dump him, and then one day after that, maybe you’d want to be with me instead. If I had told you, I would’ve either been the creep who broke up your relationship so I could get with you myself, or I would just become the cousin slash best-friend of the guy who cheated on you. Either way, I’d lose you. Obviously, I made the wrong decision, but it was only because I didn’t want to hurt you, and because I didn’t want to hurt myself either, even though I ended up hurting both of us.” 

I finished when I ran out of breath. I had no idea I could even speak so many words in such little time and it seemed like Dany was startled by it as well because she kept staring at me, mouth slightly agape like she wanted to respond but nothing came out. Her eyes blinked twenty times in the span of silence that befell us until the front door opened up behind her. 

“Daenerys!” called out a man too old to be considered elderly. More like ancient, but that was probably just my teenage perspective talking. “Is that you, dear?!”

“Yeah, it’s me. I’m sorry. I’m coming in now,” Dany replied, turning and leaping up the porch steps. 

“Who are you talking to out here?” asked the old man who I presumed to be Dany’s great-uncle, since I already knew that was her guardian. “Aren’t you finally going to introduce me to the boy you’ve been spending all your time with?”

Dany glanced back at me, bottom lip between her teeth before turning back to her uncle and saying “This is just my friend, Jon.”

Unsure of what to do, I cautiously approach, ascending the steps and holding my hand out to shake the man’s. “Nice to meet you, sir.”

It takes a few tries, but eventually his cold, wrinkled hand falls into mine and we shake. Dany never told me – nor had Robb because Robb would have told me – that her uncle was blind, but it explains why she was never able to get rides from him anywhere. 

“Nice to meet you as well. Jon Snow, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. . . How did you –”

“Relax,” he said, releasing my hand to take hold of Dany’s shoulder. “The blindness does not make me psychic. My great-niece has mentioned you. Come on in. We were just about to have pie.”

I looked to Dany, but she was already helping her uncle back into the house, so I hesitantly followed. I soon discovered that by ‘we’ the man had meant him and a young woman who lived next door. A nurse who looked after him when Dany wasn’t around, though I also quickly learned that her uncle, pridefully, did not like to have his nurse referred to as his nurse. 

We ate pie and I tried to make a good impression, though I supposed it didn’t really matter. I wasn’t Dany’s boyfriend, and as far as I knew then, I never would be. 

“Can I show Jon something in my room?” asked Dany after setting the dishes in the sink to which her uncle agreed, so maybe I had made a good impression. 

Confusion was etched across my face as I was led down a narrow hallway and into a small bedroom. A twin bed pressed up against a lilac wall and wooden blocks spelling out DAENERYS arranged atop her dresser beside a porcelain doll on a stand wearing an emerald green gown. 

“Your room is cute.”

“My uncle let me decorate it when I was ten, so this is what I was into when I was ten.”

“I was into battle bots.”

The corner of her mouth lifts. “You still are.” After a more somber beat, she continued. “I owe you an apology. I shouldn’t have said that stuff to you. That part about how you’re different from Robb.”

“I am different from him.”

Both corners lift then. “I know.” And then they fall. “But I’m a hypocrite. I’ve been mad at you for not wanting me, but I don’t even know what I want.”

“I do want you.” 

The words that came out of my mouth surprised me as much as they surprised Dany, but I did tell her I wouldn’t lie to her again. 

“You do?”

“Of course I do. I know that I don’t act as passionately as Robb, but that doesn’t mean I’m not passionate. I am very, very passionate about you. I think you are. . . perfect.”

“I’m not.”

“To me, you are.”

“Are you saying you want to be with me?”

“I’m saying that I love you.”

She blinked hard, cheeks flushed. 

I continued. “I’m saying that I can be your friend if that’s what you want, but I can also be more. I can be what you deserve.” 

When she didn’t immediately reply, I finished with “Just think about it, okay?” because I probably saw someone say that in a movie once and it made him look really suave and cool. 

Or maybe I didn’t say that. Maybe she was the one who told me she had to think about it. What I do remember is leaving that house as quickly as possible without actually running before I threw up all that pie in the gutter behind my car. My very first thought after crawling back into the driver’s seat was that I’d made a huge mistake and that I wanted to take it all back because she probably thought I was a pathetic fool, love sick over someone way out of my league. She could date anyone. She dated Robb and he was the pickiest person I knew. Why, after all she had put up with from him, would she suddenly choose me?

* * * * *

**DANY**

With a clenched jaw, I stand in front of the bathroom mirror dabbing foundation over the purple marks decorating the right side of my neck, tender to the touch. When Robb comes in behind me, his reflection shows him eyeing me up and down with a look of disapproval. 

“You’re wearing that?” he asks. 

Immediately, I quit what I’m doing and look down at myself as if I’ve forgotten what I’d put on. 

“You’re wearing jeans,” he informs me. 

“They’re black,” I meekly argue. 

He sighs. “I’ll find something appropriate for you to wear” and then adds “And try not to put so much makeup on. Sometimes you wear too much makeup and it’s just. . . Just don’t do it.”

I send his back a glare as he walks out of the bathroom and to our closet. 

“Can you try not to be so mean to me?” 

“I’m not being mean, Dany,” he replies while rummaging through my clothes. “I just want things to be perfect today, alright? Is that too much to ask? It is my uncle’s funeral after all.” He pulls a black dress with no sleeves from the closet and tosses it onto our bed. “There. Put that on.”

“Robb, it’s like forty-five degrees outside!”

“It’ll warm up by the time we get there. Just. . .” he shrugs “wear leggings or something. And where are those shoes you wore to my boss’s Easter party?”

As he goes back to search my closet, I protest “I can’t wear heels, Robb. They’ll sink into the grass.”

“Fine. What about the shoes you wear sometimes – the ones with the really skinny laces?”

“I don’t know. Under the bed maybe,” I answer before I realize what I’ve just done. “But, I can get them. Don’t worry about it.” 

But he’s already on his knees, crouched down to peer underneath the bed. My heart thumps hard against my chest as I watch him pull the shoes in question out, and then, as if happening in slow motion, he squints his eyes and slides out our red suitcase. 

“Why is this under here?” he asks. 

“I don’t know,” I answer as casually as I can. “Maybe one of us put it there after you unpacked from your trip.”

“I took the blue suitcase on my tip.”

“Huh. Well, you’re guess is as good as mine.”

His expression suggests that he’s skeptical, but if he doesn’t believe me, he doesn’t say anything and a second later I’m saved by Arya knocking on the door and popping her head in to exclaim “Are we getting out of here anytime soon, or what? Sansa’s going to kill us if we’re late.”

“Yeah,” Robb answers with a bitterness to his voice. “Dany just has to finish getting dressed.”

“I’ll be out soon,” I assure my sister in-law, making note of the black jeans she’s wearing. 

Thankfully, Robb leaves behind her and I’m alone again to let out the breath I’d been holding on to. The only other words Robb speaks to me before we leave the house for the cemetery are to indignantly comment on how I’d left my hair down. 

We get to the cemetery a half hour before the service is to begin, but by the look on Sansa’s face, we’re already late. There are already twenty or so people chit chatting by the service site and a stream of cars are still filing in. I dread the state of my house after the reception is finished with and more so the state of myself once I’ve finished cleaning up. But that is not what keeps my eyes darting every other second toward the hoard of townspeople filtering in to pay their respects. The anxiety over the found suitcase is nothing compared to that of the looming potential encounter between Robb and his cousin. 

Every time I notice Arya texting, I wonder if she’s messaging Jon to see if he’s on his way or answering a message from him about where to park. While Robb had been wrong about the weather shifting, I find that this overwhelming sense of doom is keeping me quite warm. My hands are sweating within the pockets of my sweater and my neck is hot beneath my hair. My legs, however, still find the air unforgiving. 

I manage to hold conversations with our many acquaintances without registering anything they’re saying, or even what I’m saying. All I can think of is if I could possibly get away with fleeing right now. Call an Uber and run during the service, go straight to an airport and book the next flight somewhere, anywhere. But then I wouldn’t get to see Jon. If I can’t speak to him, at least I can see him. See how time and distance has changed him. I had never pegged him for a Los Angeles kind of person, but maybe I had just wanted too badly for him to be a _here_ kind of person that it hadn’t occurred to me that he’d be better suited someplace else.

Robb had put his arm around me as soon as we arrived and hasn’t let go since, keeping me against his side as if he can sense how badly I wish to slip away. It’s something he’s done before, always when he feels threatened, and it’s something he used to do a lot when we were young. He would drag me to parties where all the most popular and beautiful people from our school were in attendance and if I ever found myself in a conversation with another boy, Robb would soon find me, put his arm around my shoulders and keep me close to him until something distracted him enough to completely forget about me. 

I used to like it when he’d do that, even when he’d call me his arm candy, because all that told me was that he thought I was beautiful and that he wanted everyone to know that I was his. What girl wouldn’t want to belong to Robb Stark? That was when I equated ‘belonging’ with ‘loving’ but now I only see it as ‘owning.’ Robb has always wanted to own me, and I had always let him, except for when, at the start of Spring our senior year of high school, I decided that I was tired of being just arm candy. 

It was at one of those parties, one that Robb had thrown himself during the day while his mom and siblings were out at one of their soccer tournaments. After half an hour of his arm being planted firmly around my shoulders, instead of getting distracted by someone or something else, he pulled me into his bedroom, pressed me against the wall and then pressed himself against me. I’d grown so accustomed to this that I found myself kissing him back even though I didn’t want to and even though he tasted so strongly of tequila that I thought I might get drunk off his saliva. Over the years I’ve occasionally managed to convince myself that I didn’t have sex with him that day, that I had put my hands on his chest and pushed him away before he could lift up my dress and tug down his pants, but like I said. . . I’d grown used to it. Getting fucked by Robb seemed as natural, though albeit annoying, as taking out the trash or making my bed. It was never particularly intimate and never exactly special, so in the moment, even as I thought of Jon, it didn’t seem all that important to forgo sex with Robb on that the two-hundredth time. 

“Robb,” I’d eventually spoke after we had both redressed and he was itching to get back out to the festivities. “I don’t want to do this anymore.” 

“Do what? Go to parties, or fuck at parties?” he asked indifferently. 

“Neither.” I sigh, not expecting to be having this conversation with his cum staining the inside of my leg. “I don’t want to be your girlfriend anymore.”

He laughed at first, thinking I was joking, but eventually his face turned serious and he took a step back. He wasn’t happy at all. He yelled at me, upset that I would even come to his party just to break up with him and at the time I genuinely felt guilty. I felt that I should have gone straight home after he told me to leave, because what sort of slut fucks one guy and then professes her love for a different guy in the same afternoon? But, I didn’t go home. I walked all the way to town feeling light and strong and for those three miles in which I was free of Robb on my own volition, the air felt different in my lungs. 

As soon as I got to Stark Autobody Shop, I carefully searched for Jon. Carefully, because Benjen would get snippy when people ran in his shop, but my heart was beating a hundred times a second until I found him looking under the hood of a VW hatchback. 

“Jon!” I nearly shouted, though he stood a couple feet from me. 

Startled, he nearly smacked his head on the top of the hood before turning to raise his eyebrows at me. He asked what was going on and why I looked like I ran there, but before I could answer, Benjen had popped up behind me. 

“Hey, Dany. How’s school going? How’s my nephew treating you?” he asked and my face turned even redder than it already was, knowing that he could have very well been talking about Jon, despite my knowing he was referring to Robb. 

“Good! Would it be alright if I pulled Jon away for a few minutes?”

“Um. . .” the middle-aged man began, scratching his chin as if to think about it. “Well, he’s got a lunch break coming up. You want to take your lunch now, Jon?”

Though skeptical, since it wasn’t every day that I surprised him at work, he nodded and let me pull him away from the shop, around the corner and into the alleyway separating the shop from a nail salon. 

“What’s going on? Are you okay?”

“Did you mean what you said the other night?” I ask, still out of breath. 

“Which part?”

“When you told me that you love me.”

It took him a few seconds to respond, but I knew that was just because of his own self-esteem at being confronted with his own confessions. But he eventually gives a soft, yet confident “Yes.”

I took a breath, soaking in his affirmation before forcing the emotions that wish to explode right out of me into containment. I hadn’t broken up with Robb just to get into something similar with Jon. A relationship full of distrust and deceit. 

“I need to tell you something,” I began, suddenly feeling scared and very much aware that I probably smelled like Robb’s sweat as much as my own. But that intoxicating scent that captured my senses from Jon filled me with enough hope to carry on. “I had sex with Robb.”

His expression never changed. “I know. He’s kind of a bragger, so I’ve heard things.”

My own expression soured at the thought of Robb talking about fucking me to Jon, but there were more important matters to discuss. “No, I mean that I had sex with him today.”

This time, the look on his face shifted but only into a slight cringe. “You came over here to tell me that you hooked up with my cousin today?”

“No, I came all the way here to tell you that I broke up with your cousin today, but I don’t want to keep anything from you. Even though we aren’t together, I feel like I fucked up because I slept with him when all I wanted was to get away from him and be with you. I don’t want to be like Robb. I don’t want to fuck with other people behind the back of the person that I love. I just wanted to be honest with you and I promise that I’ll never do it again. I don’t want him. I don’t want to be his girlfriend, I don’t want to sleep with him, I don’t want anything from him. I want _you_.”

I took in a sharp inhale to refill my lungs while I awaited his response, but it seemed like I had broken him because he just stood there, blinking at the segment of wall right beside my head. 

“Jon?” I took his hand into both of mine and squeezed to break him out of the trance I somehow put him under. “I don’t want you to think I’m a slut. I don’t want you to think that I want to sleep with other people, or even that I enjoy sleeping with Robb because I really don’t enjoy it that much. I only did it because he wanted to do it and – fuck, I’m going to stop talking about sleeping with Robb. Just. . . Jon, I’m sorry. I’m just sorry. Sometimes I hate myself so much because I end up doing the exact opposite of what I really want to do. Can you forgive me?”

Finally, he spoke, but not very well. “I. . . I don’t. . . I don’t care what you did with Robb today. Are you saying that you love me?”

Nodding vigorously, I proclaimed that “Yes. I think I’ve loved you for a while now and I’m sorry that it took so long for me to realize it. I was terrible to you –”

“You weren’t.”

“—but it was only because I was scared. I was willing to stay in a relationship with someone I didn’t really love because it seemed easier than admitting that there might be someone out there – right in front of me – who I could actually, really, truly, and with all of my heart _love_. You’re pretty much my favorite person in the entire world, and you deserve the best girlfriend in the world. I don’t know if I can be that, but I’m going to try really hard, okay? I’ve never tried to be a good girlfriend before, but I’m going to try with you. . . if you still want me.”

Slowly, back and forth, his head shakes. “Of course I still want you. I’ll always want you.”

To this day, it’s so hard to believe that two people could have been so in love without having ever so much as embraced one another before. When I leaped into his arms that afternoon, wrapping mine around his neck, burring my nose under his ear and holding tight, it was the very first time I had ever touched him in any way more than a high-five, a playful swat on the shoulder or that one time I held his hand during Piranha 3D. I had milked the scent of that sweatshirt he gave me for as long as I could before it eventually just smelled like everything else in my room, but as I held him in that alleyway, I felt I might swoon over the aroma. 

I pressed quick, excitable kisses to the side of his face before our mouths found each other’s and as our lips and tongues moved together, I’d never felt more in love with the taste of someone before. I’d never loved simply kissing someone so much before. It had almost always been a chore with Robb and any of the other boys I’d kissed before him. A kiss when they needed reassurance. A kiss when they were upset. A kiss when they were tired. A kiss when they kissed me first. But this was something else entirely. This was kissing because it was warm and soft and fun and yummy. I think we made out in that alleyway for a straight fifteen minutes before Jon realized that he would have to actually eat lunch within the next half hour or else he’d be hungry until after closing time. 

We decided to keep our new relationship under wraps, at least until Robb moved on or we all graduated and Jon wouldn’t have to worry as much about getting kicked out of his home. 

“I don’t care if we lie to everyone one else. We won’t lie to each other. That’s what matters,” I told him. “And if anyone does find out, I’ll protect you.”

His cheeks had tinged pink as he smiled at that. “Okay. I’ll protect you too.”

I miss feeling protected. And not the sort of protection Robb gifted me when he coerced me into quitting my job at Olenna’s nursery because work would be too stressful on my already “hostile” womb. Or before that, when he convinced me that I didn’t need to get my college degree because he would take care of me. Or even before that, when he bought a house to coop me in and persuaded me to change my name. Not the sort of protection that led me to have no friends, hobbies, confidence, or any marketable skills whatsoever.

We sit in the front row, right in front of a blown-up picture of Benjen and though I’ve always felt out of place in this family, never before has it been this blatant. No matter how many people have called me Mrs. Stark at this event, I’m still a Targaryen. I’m still just a sad, confused little girl who flitted from one of Benjen’s nephews to the other and then back again. More so than any other Stark, I wondered what Benjen must have thought of me, and I’d always managed to convince myself it was nothing good. 

Sansa begins the procession, but half way through her beginning eulogy, I suddenly can’t hear a word she’s saying because something else is filling my senses. How could it be possible that after all these years, he would still smell the same? Every breath I take suddenly feels labored and the fact that people will assume I am simply being overly emotional about the death of a man I wasn’t even related to only serves to build my anxiety up past the point of containment. 

“Robb,” I whisper to my husband. “I left the address cards for the reception in the car. I’ve got to go get them.”

“Jesus, Dany. Now?” he hisses quietly. 

“I’ll be right back.”

I jump to my feet and hurry around the crowd, my eyes betraying me as they glance at the rows behind where I had sat and sure enough, seated right beside Arya, wearing a black hoodie instead of a coat over his dress clothes, is a man who bears a striking resemblance to the boy who had become absolutely everything to me for six months when we were eighteen years old. 

Six months? I was with him for less months than the number of years I’ve been married to Robb and now his eyes are turning to glance at me. I avert mine quickly and continue on my path back to the car, suddenly feeling more ill than I ever have. I need to pull myself together, but I suddenly become aware that I never really was together to begin with, not since Jon and not before him.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic contains a lot of angst, mature/triggering themes (including death/loss and domestic abuse), and characters who are misguided, depressed and flawed. I hope you enjoy this work, but if you do not, I understand and respect that. If at any point this work is not to your liking, I will not be offended if you choose to stop reading. I have rated this fic "Mature" for a reason. To reiterate: It's just a story. I wrote it for my own personal enjoyment and creative growth and do not expect it to appeal to all readers. Enjoy, or don't. No pressure. (this has also been added to the Notes section before Chapter One).

**JON**

I pull in through the cemetery gates, just another vehicle in a never ending line of them, with a pit in my stomach and sandpaper behind my eyes. I could hardly sleep at all last night. I lied in bed for hours, staring up at the ceiling until probably four in the morning and then woke up at least two hours before the time I had set my alarm for. I managed a short nap sitting down at the bottom of the shower before I trimmed my beard into something that looks intentional rather than slovenly and dressed in the nicest clothes I own. I forgot to bring my suit jacket, however, so I wear a black sweater instead. I don’t think anyone is expecting me to make a good impression anyway. 

It’s ten to eleven when I find a parking spot and call Arya because I’m too much of a chicken to walk alone into this crowd of people, some I remember from when I lived in this town as a teenager. I throw a few wool blankets into the bed of my truck for Ghost and give him a long neck scratch, lingering until Arya finally finds me. I feel like I’m seven years old and too afraid to walk into another kid’s birthday party on my own and need my mom to hold my hand until I find a familiar face. 

“Oh my God, Jon,” Arya’s huffy voice speaks behind me and I turn to see my petite cousin frowning at me with her fists against her hips. “Way to show up at the last freaking second!” 

“Hey, have you gotten taller?” I ask with a half-smile which earns me a hardy eye roll, but her faux-frustration only lasts a second longer before her lips curl up and she’s standing up on her toes to give me a tight hug. 

“I’ve missed you,” she breathes against my shoulder. 

“Missed you, too. You need to come out to LA more.”

She releases me and smirks. “I’m a Northerner now. All that sun is bad for my delicate complexion.”

“Nothing about you is delicate.”

After a glance behind her, Arya sighs. “I guess we should take our seats.”

“Too late to ditch?”

She slides her arm around mine and coaxes me along with her. Throwing my head over my shoulder, I give Ghost the simplest of commands. “Ghost. Stay there.”

His big white head disappears under the side of the truck bed and I know that he’s burying himself into his blankets. 

“Don’t worry,” Arya whispers as she leads me to a row directly behind another of my cousins with a much less respectable opinion of me and a young woman who sits beside him, tucked against his side, long silvery hair fallen in gentle waves over the back of her chair. “I’ll protect you.”

That was something Dany used to say to me, that she would protect me, and she always said it with a funny smile like she never really believed that she could protect me, but every time she said it, I felt safer. 

After she had broken up with Robb, naturally we all stopped hanging out together, and Robb lived under the assumption that that meant Dany and I had stopped hanging out, but really we were spending more time with one another than we ever had. It was just that Robb was so busy with all of his various activities and all of his various friends that he never bothered to notice that I was spending more and more time outside of the house after work and on weekends. 

Dany’s uncle liked me so much that he eventually let me call him Aemon rather than Mr. Targaryen and he even let me be alone with Dany in her bedroom from time to time, with the door open of course. After school, I had work at the shop but Dany would often times sit in Benjen’s seldom used office and do her homework until my breaks where we would go back to my car and make out. 

When it started to become obvious to Benjen that Dany and I were much more than just friends, I asked him not to tell anyone, especially Robb. 

“It’s none of my business,” he had replied. “But, I always thought she was only dating Robb to spend time with you.”

Sundays were my favorite days because I didn’t work on Sundays. I would drive Dany out to the plot of land Benjen had inherited from my long-deceased grandfather, intending to build himself a house on the hill that overlooked the town – something that never did come to fruition. We would walk all around the many acres and muse about the sort of house that could be built upon it and the sort of life one could have living upon it. 

“I wouldn’t even need a house,” I told her. “I could just live in a tent up on that hill and be happy. Every morning I’d come down to the creak and catch fish for breakfast –”

“I don’t like fish,” Dany replied with a scrunch of her nose.

“So what?”

“Well, what am I going to eat?”

“You? You’re going to live in a tent with me?”

She smiled wide and wrapped her arms around my waist. “You think I’m going to let you be homeless all by yourself, Jon Snow?”

“Alright,” I draped my arms around her neck and pressed my cheek to her forehead. “What do you want for breakfast then?”

“French toast.”

“French toast? Well, we’ll need some chicken then, for the eggs. And. . . a fire pit, for the stove. And. . . we’re going to need bread. . .”

Dany released me to snap her fingers. “I’ve got it. A grocery store!”

“Alright, so all we need are some chickens, a firepit, and a full-blown grocery store right here on the property.” 

“I like this plan.”

After our walk, we’d throw down a blanket and settle on the hill or down by the water, eat bags of gummy worms and gold fish crackers. 

“You know what my favorite part about this place is?” she would tell me every now and again, and each time I would pretend like I didn’t know the answer. 

“What?”

“That no one can see us.” And then she’d kiss me and I’d kiss her back. 

“Well. . .” I had replied the very first time, turning my eyes up at the sky above. “Someone is always watching.”

She raised an eyebrow, suspiciously. “God?”

“Aliens.”

She rolled on top of me and pinned me down against the blanket, knees planted on either side of me. “There he is,” she breathed against my mouth. “There’s the nerd I fell in love with.” 

And then she kissed me again, but this time the kiss lasted long enough for her panties to slip off and my jeans to come undone. That was the first time we had sex. After I made that stupid joke about aliens and I always thought it was so cool that I didn’t have to be cool for Dany to want me. I had been a virgin before then, something I knew she knew but we didn’t talk about just like we never again talked about how she had slept with Robb despite my knowing all too well that she had done so on many, many occasions. Experience, or lack thereof, never seemed to be a factor when we’d have sex. Everything just sort of fell into place, even that very first time, only a couple of weeks after we started our elusive relationship. 

Afterward, we simply lied on that blanket in the grass, close to one another. Images of me and her flashed through my mind, images regarding the future and how I wanted desperately for her to be a part of mine. 

“What do you want to do after graduation?” I had asked her. 

“I don’t know,” she’d said softly, but she usually began answers that way only to follow up with something thoughtful after a moment to contemplate. “Go to school I suppose. I’ve been thinking about taking business classes.”

“Business?” I asked, surprised only because the picture of her sitting behind a desk in a high-rise building didn’t add up to what I knew about her.

“Yeah. Like, I think I might like to own a business one day. It’s kind of silly, but I love movies and I love going to the theater so I was thinking it would be really awesome to own one of those little one-screen theaters that only show indie art movies with lots of sex and documentaries about saving animals.”

“So, the best kinds of movies. I don’t think that’s silly at all. I think that sounds super cool.”

Her cheeks pinkened as she smiled. “Yeah? What do you want to do after graduation?”

“I think I want to build houses. Like the Sims, but for real. I want to help Benjen build his house so that I can learn how to and then I want to build one for myself.”

“Really? And am I invited to this house you’re going to build for yourself?”

“Oh, I suppose you could drop by for a visit every now and then.”

Her face scrunched, pretending not to find me completely hilarious and I put my arms around her and pulled her against me. “I’m just kidding,” I said softly. “You’re always invited. Every day.”

Looking up at me with a bat of her eyelashes, she asked “Can I have my own room?”

“Your own room? Daenerys Targaryen, I thought you liked me.”

She giggled against my chest. “Contrary to how I’ve lived my life until recently,” she began with a smile, but I could tell she was saying something in earnest “I am an independent woman who will not abide by arbitrary social norms designed to strip women of their subjectivity. I will not let my life revolve around a man, even if he is amazing and cute and really good with his hands. I’ll need my own space, my own things, a place where I can go to and be alone sometimes.” 

“Okay. You can have your own room. But I get the biggest room, because I built it.”

Her smile turned wicked as she said “We’ll see about that,” and then we were back to kissing.

* * * * *

Almost as soon as the service begins, Dany is squirming out of Robb’s arm and hurrying off toward the parking lot. I watch her go, because it’s impossible to keep my eyes off of her even if all I can see is the back of her head. But as she moves down the isle, I catch the quickest of glimpses at her face and find that she looks exactly the same as I remember her and the sudden shock of seeing the girl who literally haunts my dreams in person churns my stomach. For a split second I think that our eyes actually meet, but as soon as it happens, it’s gone and so is she, moving swiftly through a crowd of people who I’m sure would love nothing more than to see drama ensue between us. 

I look back ahead to find Robb’s eyes on me, an eerily blank expression on his face, and though it only lasts a few seconds, it feels like a lifetime. 

* * * * * 

**DANY**

Even though I had the reception cards tucked away in my sweater pocket, I unlock the car and pretend to search through the glove box, just in case. I do it slowly, though, and when I’ve finished, I linger by the car singing nineties songs in my head to distract myself from all other thoughts. 

“It seems no one can help me now. I’m in too deep. There’s no way out,” I begin to sing quietly to myself as my feet carry me slowly down the line of parked cars. “This time I have really led myself astray.”

I let my eyes close and focus on the cold breeze against my cheeks. “Runaway train never going back. Wrong way on a one-way track. Seems like I should be getting somewhere. Somehow I’m neither here nor there. Can you help me remember –”

A flash of something big and very close jolts into my peripheral vision and I jump backwards, nearly falling down on the ground. From the bed of a blue truck stands the biggest dog I’ve ever laid eyes on, puffed up with thick white fur and its eyes wide and red as they stare into me. 

“Hello there,” I say nervously, noticing that there is nothing tethering this beast to the truck. “I’m sorry I disturbed you. Please don’t eat me.”

The dog’s head stretches toward me, the nostrils on it’s long snout vibrating as he or she sniffs me, probably to see if I’d be worth devouring or not. But then the animal’s head retracts and I let out a breath, but my relief is short lived because a moment later, the dog leaps from the truck and into the grass in front of me. Standing on four legs, the top of its head nearly reaching my shoulders and in the three seconds it takes for it to close the gap between us, my whole life flashes before my eyes. Of all the things I had been so worried about on this day, I never considered that being eaten alive by a monster was a possibility. 

But rather than opening up its jaw and swallowing me whole, the dog instead presses the side of its face against my shoulder and wiggles it about like a kitten might do to your ankles. When its mouth does open, its to swipe my jaw with its tongue. 

I squirm and find myself bringing my hands up to hold its head back from me, but this contact only seems to further enthuse the dog. He begins to squirm too, wagging his head about just as his tail does. When I release him, he swirls around in circles counterclockwise over and over before its front legs hop like it’s taking all the restraint in the dog’s massive body not to jump up on top of me. 

Anxiety leaves me through a chuckle at the beast’s smile – perhaps the happiest anyone’s been to see me in ages. 

“Ghost!” A voice speaks that just about stops my heart. Exactly the same, I think. He sounds exactly the same. I swallow the lump in my throat and turn toward it, the body coming toward me and causing me to shove my hands nervously into my coat pockets and stand a little bit straighter. “Say hi,” he says, and I’m confused for a moment until I realize he’s not speaking to me. 

The dog – Ghost, is it? – stands up on its back legs and bats its right paw through the air up and down as if to wave at Jon. 

“Not to me. To her,” Jon says, but Ghost has already dropped down to four legs and began spinning in circles once more. 

Jon looks at me then, eyes finding mine, the same grey, haunting eyes I used to gaze so longingly into all those years ago. 

“He’ll only do it to me. I haven’t figured out how to get him to do it to other people yet,” he explains, though the solemn, awkward manner in which he says the words tells me that’s not really what he wants to say to me. 

“This is your dog?” I ask. “This is your truck?”

His head nods and I notice his hands are shoved into his pockets as well. That is, until he pulls down the back panel of the truck and commands Ghost back up into the bed. “Stay,” he tells the dog firmly before giving him a scratch behind the ear. 

I feel I should leave, run back to Robb without another word, but something keeps my feet planted where I stand. 

“How are you?” I find myself asking. 

Slowly, his shoulders rise and fall and his eyes avert to the grass below, lending me a chance to look him over. He looks different. Not much, but different. I wonder if he’s still the same person he was back then, or if that night changed him as much as it changed me. For so long he doesn’t respond, and I realize what an idiotic question it was. How are you? At his uncle’s funeral. Maybe Robb is right. Maybe I am cursed to be perpetually selfish and insensitive. 

Something pulls me closer to him. Not much. Just one step, but to just be one foot closer to him I’m locked in this fierce gravitational pull wanting to send me colliding against the boy I loved – no longer a boy at all. 

“I’m sorry,” I say softly. 

When his eyes find me once more with a look of sad confusion, the lips I used to kiss ask “For what?” I realize that his melancholic disposition before me had nothing to do with what was happening across the cemetery that may as well be a thousand miles from us. 

“I. . .” My head shakes but for no reason except to do something. “I. . .” but my words fail me. Ten years and I can’t think of one thing to say to him. I haven’t been so naïve as to think that I would never see him again, but how can I even begin to explain what all has happened since I saw him last. I don’t even remember the last thing I said to him, or the last thing he said to me. Eventually, I speak just above a whisper into the air between us “I’m sorry about your uncle.”

The way his eyes twitch ever so slightly almost has me believe he’d forgotten this was a funeral and that Benjen is no longer living. They begin to glass over and his hands have to leave his pockets just to cover them and wipe away the tears. 

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, turning away from me and now I know how he felt because I don’t know what he’s apologizing for either. There’s so much to apologize for yet, simultaneously, sorry is the last thing I need to hear from him. He says it again. “I’m sorry.”

I soon find I’m no match for gravity and fall into him, wrapping my arms around his waist like I’d been doing it my whole life and not just those six months when we were eighteen. I’ve forgotten about Robb and all the rest of those people gathered around that coffin talking out their grief. I’ve got enough grief inside of me, I don’t need theirs, but I want so much in that moment to take Jon’s away, absorb it into me and carry it so that he wouldn’t have to anymore. Does he think that I don’t understand? Does he think that I want him to suffer? 

His arms fold around my neck and I feel his cheek press against the side of my head. He smells the same, he sounds the same, and he feels the same too. With my eyes closed it’s like time never passed, we never grew older, and we never left that plot of land in the foothills. 

“I’m sorry,” he keeps whispering against me, so softly I can hardly hear it, but eventually his voice dies and we simply stand there, holding each other to the sound of our hearts beating and the breeze whirling past our ears. 

I never knew pain could feel so tranquil. 

“Dany!” 

Startled by the familiarity of the cold, stern voice behind me, I let Jon go and stumble backward, turning to see my husband wearing an unforgiving stare. I wipe the tears from my eyes that have suddenly began to spill out of my lids like a faucet had been turned on. As I weep, I hurry past Robb before he can capture me and scold me like a child for disobeying him, thinking that if I just go back to the service everything will be alright because there are so many people there who Robb wouldn’t dare embarrass us in front of. 

I don’t know how much time passes as I’m sitting back in my seat pretending to listen to one townsperson after the other tell stupid tales about Benjen, but when Robb eventually does sit back down beside me, the tension he exudes is palpable. 

* * * * * 

**JON**

“Why are you here?”

I’m cold again without Dany here, but I feel so unworthy of the short reprieve from the temperature she granted me just a minute ago. 

“He was my uncle, too,” I respond less than warmly, and maybe I shouldn’t be so snippy with him after what I did, but I can’t help that I don’t feel as much guilt toward him than I do for Dany, or even for myself. DNA isn’t everything. DNA is just science. It isn’t love. 

“You’re here for our uncle? You’re not here for any other reason?” he asks like it’s an accusation. 

“No.”

“Good. Stay away from my wife.”

“I wasn’t trying to cause trouble.”

“You never try to cause trouble, Jon, but that’s all you fucking do. Don’t talk to her, don’t go near her, don’t even fucking look at her. And stay away from my house after this.”

“Hey!” Arya interjects, marching up to us with her arms raised in an overly dramatic shrug. “What the heck?”

Robb turns to his youngest sister and points an accusatory finger at her. “Why do you always have to stir shit up? You knew I didn’t want him here.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Did I confuse your private birthday party for an uncle’s funeral again? I had no idea this thing was invite-only, especially considering we don’t even know half of the people who’re here right now.”

“Fuck you, Arya,” he spits before turning and marching back off toward the service. Arya mocks her brother’s tone under her breath before Robb spins around long enough to shout “And keep him away from my fucking house!”

Not the least bit slighted, Arya offers me a small smile. “Someone forgot to take his bitch meds this morning.”

I sigh and lean against the side of my truck. “Forgive me if I’m not really in the mood to laugh.”

Leaning beside me, she looks up at me and says “Well, at least you showed up. Uncle Benjen would be proud of you for that.”

It sounds like something Ygritte would say. “I really don’t think he knows the fucking difference.”

“Probably not. But I’m glad I get to see you.”

I drape my arm around her neck and give her a half-hug. “Is it too early to leave?”

“Nah. I know a bar that’s already open.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic contains a lot of angst, mature/triggering themes (including death/loss and domestic abuse), and characters who are misguided, depressed and flawed. I hope you enjoy this work, but if you do not, I understand and respect that. If at any point this work is not to your liking, I will not be offended if you choose to stop reading. I have rated this fic "Mature" for a reason. To reiterate: It's just a story. I wrote it for my own personal enjoyment and creative growth and do not expect it to appeal to all readers. Enjoy, or don't. No pressure.
> 
> (** Notes for this Chapter: I know it has been a few days since the last chapter was posted and I normally don't like keeping everyone waiting so long, but the holidays just be like that. I've been out of town, staying with family, so there hasn't been much time to immerse myself in solitude to proofread and post. However, as a Holiday gift to you all, Chapter 6 is a long one! Divided into a Part One and Part Two. Happy Holidays everyone!)

**PART ONE**

**JON**

“I never should have come.”

With a low groan, Arya throws back a shot of whiskey and shakes her head at the taste. “Stop saying that and fucking drink one of these.”

We’re at some dive bar, the only people here who aren’t hard core alcoholics, I’m sure, but give us time. I swig back my own shot, barely feeling the burn. 

“When did you do this?” I ask, pointing toward her left ear where she has little silver hoops and studs decorating the entire length of the ear. 

“Periodically, over the course of a couple years. I’ll have to show you my tattoos later, but not all of them. Some of them are in some pretty precarious places.”

I cringe slightly as she sends a signal to the bartender for another round. 

“She hugged me,” I state with a somber confusion. “Why would she do that?”

Arya lets out a sigh and slumps her shoulders, a visual sign that she’s finally going to accept that I will be absolutely no fun today. “I don’t know. I don’t know how she can hug Robb either. You both stink.”

I give a look that says her tactics of bringing humor into the conversation will be fruitless and she finally turns serious. “Look, just forget about her. She was probably just fucking with your head. She’s a bitch, Jon.”

“No, she’s not.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know her anymore.”

“I _know_ her.”

“Fine, fine,” she huffs. The bartender delivers our drinks and Arya wastes no time taking a sip of her double shot. “Whether she is or is not a bitch, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that she had two years to change her mind and she never did. She married Robb, God knows why, and she’s had eight years since then to leave the idiot, which she hasn’t done. So why in the ever-loving fuck are you freaking out about her giving you one hug after you started sobbing at your uncle’s funeral?”

“You’re right.”

“I know I’m right. Now stop thinking about her.” She waves her hands around in front of my face as if to put a spell on me. “I hereby banish all thoughts of Daenerys Stark from your mind.”

“Who were we talking about?”

“Exactly.” She pushes my drink closer toward me. “Now drink up.”

I comply, but nothing in my demeanor, or mindset, has changed. “You know it isn’t that simple, right? I know you don’t understand, but it isn’t like we just broke up.”

“I do understand,” she insists softly, finally finding a reassuring tone. “I know what Robb thinks happened, but I also know what actually happened, and guess what? It wasn’t your fault. That’s not just my opinion either. That was the opinion of the police and the opinion of the district attorney. And I think that deep down, you and Dany know that it wasn’t your fault either. Maybe that’s why she hugged you. So that you would stop blaming yourself for a terrible and unfortunate _accident_ and move on, because she sure as hell has. I mean, shit, she and Robb would probably have a baby right now if it weren’t for her fucked up uterus. Which is just further evidence that you did nothing –”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Oh. . .” she sends me a questioning side glance. “I thought I told you. She was pregnant again like six or so months ago, but she had another miscarriage. I told you about the one she had a couple years ago, though, right?”

“No.”

“Oh. . .” 

“She had two miscarriages?” 

Now unwilling to meet my eyes, Arya shrugged. “I suppose theoretically she could have had a bunch of miscarriages, but I am only aware of the two.” When I frown at her flippancy, she gains a more apologetic tone. “I’m sorry. I get mean when I’m uncomfortable. And I thought we were here to get away from death talk. I’m fairly certain in was only the two, though. But what’s the big deal? You had nothing to do with any of that.”

But maybe I did. Maybe what happened when we were eighteen messed her up somehow. She had to have surgery and things could have gotten twisted around inside of her and now her body keeps rejecting her attempts to build a family. No matter who Dany’s with, she deserves to have a family of her own and I may very well have stripped that chance from her. 

“Is she okay?” I ask. 

“I don’t know. I told you. She’s a bitch.”

“Arya, I’m going to fucking leave if you keep calling her a bitch.”

“You asked me how she is. It’s not my fault that I perceive her to be a bitch, Jon.”

“Well word it a different way at least.”

“Fine.” She sighs and throws back the rest of her drink, immediately ordering another. “She’s fake.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means she’s fake. Everything she does is fake. Everything she says is fake. When she smiles, it’s fake. When she doesn’t smile, it’s fake. I know what I’m talking about, Jon. I’ve been living in that house for two days and it’s like being around a fucking alien. And what does she even do all day? That’s what I want to know, because as far as I can tell she only exists to sit in that house or go shopping. That’s weird, Jon. That is how I will rephrase it. She isn’t a bitch. She’s _weird_.”

Slumping back in my chair, I swallow the double shot in front of me in one go before giving my temples a much needed massage. “I don’t like that,” I mutter. 

“Jon. . .” Arya begins in the most tentative fashion I’ve heard her speak all day. “Are you really still in love with her, or do you just miss the girl she was when she was with you?”

Eventually, we succeed in getting drunk and we’re both staggering out of the bar. Arya says she’s going to take an Uber back to Robb’s place and I tell her that I’m just going to walk back to the hotel. I command Ghost down from my truck and hook him up to his leash. As soon as my cousin is safely in the back of a stranger’s Nissan, I begin the trek toward the Marriot I’d checked into.

* * * * *

**DANY**

Everything seems so normal between us, which is what perplexes me the most. Even on the car ride home from the service, while we’re trying to beat everyone to the reception in order to unlock the front door and put out some directional signs along the street for our guests, Robb acts almost pleasant, making small talk about the weather and how he really needs to take his car in for an oil change but isn’t sure where to take it since Benjen’s shop has been closed for obvious reasons. 

Throughout the reception, he is almost polite when he speaks to me and he doesn’t do that thing where he puts his arm around me possessively. Maybe it is because he knew that Jon wasn’t going to show up. I don’t know what they said to each other after I left, and I didn’t dare inquire, but I can reasonably assume Robb had told him in no uncertain terms to go back home. The thought of Jon leaving, though, causes me such heartache that I’m sure my sadness shows through as I speak to our guests about Benjen. I wonder if Benjen would hate me even more if he knew I wasn’t even sad about him during his own wake. Arya never shows up either, which Robb doesn’t seem to mind and Sansa absolutely disdains, but I’m glad. She always looks at me like she knows exactly what I’m thinking and the idea of a Stark knowing what I’m really thinking terrifies me. 

But as much as I wish I could see Jon one last time, when a rather small man whom I don’t immediately recognize approaches me and asks me to point Jon out to him, my heart spasms with such panic that I answer with a quick and pointed “He isn’t here” before leaving the man’s presence. God forbid Robb overhear us speaking about Jon and get the wrong idea.

It isn’t until the autumn sun is beginning to descend past the horizon that the last vestiges of partygoers filter out of our home. I don’t know why, but I let myself grow comfortable watching the trees sway in the back yard through our kitchen window as I scrub dishes at the sink under scalding water. The sound of the running faucet calms my mind and the burning heat on my palms is somehow soothing, like being placed into a slightly too-hot bath when you’re a small child. 

“Are you happy?” Robb’s voice speaks from the doorway and I turn, somewhat startled.

I turn off the water. “What?”

“I asked if you’re happy.” His arms are crossed but his expression is calm. 

“Of course I am.”

“Really? Because all I do is work to make you happy. It’s the one thing I have dedicated my life to doing and I thought I was doing a pretty good job of it.”

“You are, Robb.”

He takes a couple steps toward me. “Then why, after I asked you specifically not to speak to him, you did the exact opposite and _worse_ , you fucking touched him? You let him touch you while I’m trying to say goodbye to my dead uncle? Are you intentionally trying to humiliate me or –”

“No. No, I’m not,” I insist, my wet hands dripping onto the linoleum floor below. “He was upset. That’s all. You know I hate it when people cry in front of me. I was trying to comfort him.”

“Why the _fuck_ ” –his palm collides against the face of our refrigerator making it, and me, rattle—“would you want to comfort _him_ after what he fucking _did_ to us? What he fucking _took_ from us? Or have you forgotten?”

I shake my head, blinking the tears that fill my eyes to let them drip down onto the linoleum as well. 

“Because I sure as shit haven’t forgotten,” he exclaims, stepping even closer to me. “I remember it like it was yesterday. You, lying unconscious in that hospital bed for _days_. And after you woke up, all you did was cry because of what he did to you. And now we can’t even have a fucking baby, because of _him_.”

“That’s not true,” I quietly insist. 

“Isn’t it?! For years we try to get pregnant and in all those years, only twice does it take, and then what happens?! What happens, Dany?!”

“Stop yelling at me, Robb! I’m sorry I hugged him! Just leave me the fuck alone!” I shout at him, turning back to the sink and gripping the lip of the counter, squeezing my eyes shut that I might stave off the sobs that wish to pour out of me. 

“Is that what you want? You want me to leave you the fuck alone?” he asks, his voice eerily quiet as he presses himself against my back and stares at me in the reflection of the window before me. In the process of this fight, it had darkened enough outside to where I can see our faces in the glass when I open my eyes. I can’t remember a time when I looked so miserable. I’m used to hiding it so well. “Why aren’t you mad at him anymore?”

“It was a long time ago,” I whisper. 

“It was, wasn’t it? Dany, do you even want to have a baby?”

My nostrils flare and my chin quivers. I bring my hand up to cover my eyes as I silently cry. 

“Come here,” whispers Robb, slipping his arm around my waist and I turn to him and bury my face against his chest because I so desperately need someone to hold on to that even he could seem like a knight in shining armor with that simple softly spoken phrase. “It’s okay, Dany. Just tell me the truth. You don’t want to have a baby, do you?”

I don’t know what it is that he’s done to me, but I find my walls crumbling down and the truth pours right out with them. I shake my head as my eyes stain his tie. “I’m sorry,” I cry softly. 

“Dany,” he says, pulling me gentle away from him, just enough to make me look up and into his eyes that are so filled with hurt. “I want you to tell me the truth, Dany.”

I nod, because the flood gates have already opened and there is no containing all of my horrid truths now. 

“You didn’t have a miscarriage, did you?” 

The question stings my heart so bad I flinch, but there is nothing else I can do except shake my head. 

He exhales through his nose as his face grows redder and his eyes turn glossy. The hand he has around my arm is squeezing so tightly it burns. 

“And two years ago? While I was visiting Bran?”

Again, I shake my head and my heart stings so badly I don’t even feel his hand leave my arm, my eyes so filled with water I don’t see it again until it is colliding with the side of my face, so hard my knees give out and I’m falling to the floor. Sooner than the pain from his vicious slap can manifest, Robb is grasping my hair and forcing me to look back up at him as he cries “How could you do this do me?”

Once I’m released, he storms out, slamming the front door shut behind him and as soon as I have the strength to stand, I hurry through the living room and into the guest bathroom, because the bathrooms are the only rooms with locks on them. 

For I don’t know how long, I sit against the tub hugging my knees to my chest and thinking about how badly I fucked up by finally telling my husband the truth. This is the first time Robb has ever hit me, but I can only thank whatever God there may or may not be that he stormed off before I could admit to the bank account and the plane tickets and, worse yet, the destination of those plane tickets, or he would have probably killed me. I never even turned on a light but somehow not being able to see anything makes me feel better. Nothing can harm you when you’ve already been sucked into a black hole. 

But then I hear the front door open again before shutting with force. I hear footsteps moving quickly through the house and down the hall and my heart races as I brace for another confrontation. The doorknob jumps and rattles and so do I. Then a sharp knocking. Then a voice. 

“Anyone in there?! I gotta piss mad crazy!” It’s Arya. 

In as steady of a voice as I can manage, I call out “One second!” and then force myself to my feet. I flip on the light switch – it feels like fire to my retinas – then I unlock and open the door, trying to move past my sister in-law as quickly as I can before she notices –

“Woah, what the fuck happened to you?” she asks with a slur to her speech, taking my arm to stop me and take a long glance at how completely trashed I must look. 

“Nothing. I have a migraine,” I reply, shoving past her and closing myself up in my bedroom. 

Thankfully, she doesn’t follow. 

* * * * *

**JON**

“I’m pregnant.” 

In Benjen’s office, my oil-stained work shirt rolled up to my elbows and washer fluid in my hair, I stood, staring blankly at Dany as she delivered the news. Two months we’d been dating – the best months of my life since my mom passed, but in that moment I felt like the world was crashing down on the both of us. 

“Jon? Did you hear me?” she asked nervously. 

Pregnant? How could she be pregnant. We used condoms. . . most of the time. Fuck. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have been so careless? How could I have believed that just because I was happy and in love that nothing bad could possibly happen to us? 

“Jon?” 

Eventually, I blinked myself out of my trance long enough to ask “Are you sure?”

From her purse she pulled a plastic grocery bag and upon overturning that bag, about a dozen home pregnancy tests rained out of it and onto Benjen’s desk. “I haven’t seen a doctor yet or anything, but I’m convinced.”

Hypnotized by the pink plus signs on those long white sticks, I felt faint, queasy, like I might have an asthma attack for the first time in my life. 

“We graduate soon. This doesn’t have to be the end of the world,” Dany spoke softly, unsure of her own reassurances. 

“You want to keep it?” I asked. 

Chewing on her bottom lip, her shoulders rose and fell in a shrug, but I knew that meant that she did. 

Now, in this hotel room, I sit on the floor beside Ghost’s sleeping form and come down off of my buzz while staring down at the black and white, grainy image of the inside of Dany’s eighteen-year-old womb which once carried our child. 

“It isn’t mine, is it?” I’d asked after that first doctor’s appointment, though it wasn’t really a question, since I already knew the answer. Two weeks separated the first time we had sex from the last time she and Robb had sex and two weeks is a lot of weeks to the development of a fetus. The doctor wouldn’t be off by so much. 

We were sitting in my car, still haven’t having left the doctor’s office parking lot. I wasn’t mad. In the days before the appointment I had already decided there was a good chance the baby wouldn’t be mine, though I went into the appointment hoping beyond anything I’d ever hoped for in my life that I was the father. 

“I don’t care,” she’d whispered and even as I stared at the steering wheel, I could hear the tears in her voice. I feel her fingers curl around my hand and bring it into her lap to hold it tight. “It doesn’t matter to me. I love you. I wouldn’t want to do this with anyone but you. I want you to be the father, regardless of what science says. I’ve always sucked at science anyway. But, you have to decide if you’re okay with that. I don’t want to force you or manipulate you. If you don’t think that you’ll be able to love this baby like their your own, I’ll do it by myself and it’ll be okay. Everything will be okay.”

I turned then to look at her and though her eyes had been filling with a sad anxiety, I could tell she was speaking with conviction. 

“Just think about it, okay?” She said, or maybe she didn’t say that, but either way I needed time to think. Something she did say that I’ll always remember though, was “There’s time.”

I tuck the photo half way between the pages of the hotel bible and slip it back into the night stand drawer before crawling into bed to fall asleep to local news, muted. 

The only good thing to happen to me in a long time is that I wake up without the usual hangover headache. I stretch out of the bed and look out the window, seeing all the stars in the sky along with the reflection of the TV which is still on, playing infomercials for cleaning supplies. I have no idea why my body decided to awaken nowhere close to sunrise, but maybe it could sense something, even in its sleep, because a mere minute after my eyes open, there is a light knocking on the hotel door. 

Groaning heavily at the annoyance when I know that I put the ‘Do not disturb’ sign on the knob before turning in, I roll out of bed, turn on a lamp and pad over to the door in bare feet and the slacks and shirt I wore to the funeral. 

My eyes flood with light from the hallway as I pull the door open, but as soon as they adjust, the image before me comes into focus and leaves me truly stunned. An angel in a black dress. Silvery hair braided across one shoulder and blue eyes gazing so softly at me, just as they did at the cemetery half a day earlier, just as they did when she asked me to be the father of her child ten years ago.

My voice catches in my throat as I ask “Dany? What are you doing here?”

* * * * *

**PART TWO**

**DANY**

Graduation was on a warm June evening and not at all as dramatic or fun as teen television shows made it out to be. I sat on an uncomfortable chair for an hour listening to my least favorite classmates give their “high school experience” speeches and then stood in line for what felt like another hour waiting for our principal to call my name because Targaryen just had to start with a T, one of the last letters in the alphabet. I stood dangerously close to Robb as well because of how closely our names positioned us and though Jon was not far ahead of him, I hated the feeling of Robb being between us, literally. 

Under my robe, I was twenty-two weeks pregnant, but that was a secret kept between me, Jon, his uncle Benjen, our obstetrician, and my uncle’s nurse, Gilly, who called it by the twelfth week. Somehow, as I shook the principal’s hand and accepted my diploma, it solidified my decision to have this child even further. High school was over. I was eighteen years old. A woman about to embark on a new life while creating one as well. As I walked down the steps, trying to contain the grin wanting to spread across my face less I lose all credibility as an anti-high school misfit, I wanted so badly to wrap my arms around Jon and kiss him, because there was nothing that could stop us anymore. The world belonged to us. 

“Dany?” 

I’d been with my uncle and Gilly, listening to them talk about the reception, but the whole time all I could think of was that Jon stood just a few yards from me, pretending like he hadn’t been in contact with me for months. I relished in my excitement of tonight. A “special night” he’d been calling it for over a week though the details had been kept very much under wraps. 

At the uncomfortably familiar voice uttering my name, I turned with some hesitation and much surprise. 

“Hey, Robb,” I greeted him awkwardly, before even more awkwardly introducing him to my guests. 

After that, he asked to speak to me privately and it took everything in me not to jump to the conclusion that he had somehow found out about the baby – that perhaps Benjen had told him, because I had a feeling early on that we couldn’t trust him, though Jon was so sure. 

“I just wanted to apologize,” he said, hands in his pockets, wearing an expression that didn’t suit him. 

“Oh. . . Why?”

“I know I wasn’t the best boyfriend. I fucked up a lot. I just wanted you to know that I know that.”

“Okay.”

“You were a really good girlfriend.”

How could a compliment feel like a slight? My chest hurt all the same. “All I did was put up with your shit for longer than I should have.” My eyes widened when I realized I had spoken those words aloud rather than in my head as intended. 

For a moment he looked taken aback, obviously having not expected that response, but he quickly regained his apologetic disposition. “I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for how things went, and that I wish I would have done things differently.” 

I swallowed as my eyes glanced behind Robb to see Jon still standing with his family, pretending not to be immensely curious and possibly worried about the conversation I was having. 

“It’s okay,” I tell Robb.

“Can I hug you?” I specifically remember him asking, because it made me so uncomfortable just to be asked. Hugging was something natural that you did with someone who you were so connected to that asking was never necessary. Just the act of asking made the idea of a hug seem icky. 

But I nodded. And he hugged me. He hugged me and I hugged him back and it seemed to last forever as I wondered if he could feel that I was pregnant – wondering what he might say if I were to tell him I was pregnant.

It wasn’t really his child, though. It never was. 

Jon picked me up from my house that night and I finally gave him that kiss. We drove to Benjen’s land where I discovered what he had planned. A little yellow tent up on that hill illuminated by a string of lights and electric lanterns. With a wide smile, I climbed in through the tent’s opening only to land on a cushy air mattress covered with a thick down comforter and knitted blankets. Turning onto my back, I looked up to see the tent was sheer at the ceiling and the stars were so bright that night, blinking down at me like they were there just for my benefit. 

“What do you think?” Jon asked, crawling in and flopping down beside me. 

“We approve.”

Soft, lingering lips puckered against my cheekbone. I’d taken to speaking in plural ever since Jon decided that he was all in with me and the baby. Sometimes I’d worry about him growing annoyed by my persistently reminding him of my state, but if he was ever turned off, he never showed it. Quite the opposite actually. 

I may have been looking up at the stars, but all I could see was us – the three of us – as he slid his palm against my belly, protruded enough that I was having to really work at concealing the baby bump – evidence of our impending family – with baggy clothes and sweatshirts.

Family. . . the word had felt so beautifully controversial. That I could possibly have a family of my own – a miracle in and of itself. 

“What did Robb say to you?” Jon had eventually asked me and I could tell he’d been unsure of whether or not to ask at all. 

“Nothing important,” I’d replied, tracing my fingertip down the length of his nose. 

We stayed in that tent all night, under the stars and wrapped in blankets and the Summer fresh air, shedding clothes, exchanging kisses and touches and so much more. 

And as I’m lying in bed, pretending to be asleep while my husband finally arrives home and climbs into bed smelling of alcohol and perfume, I replay in my mind all the many things that we exchanged that night – most important of all, the gentle I love you’s.

Once I’m sure Robb is asleep, I slide silently out from under the covers, still wearing that black dress he’d made me put on this morning. I take my shoes and my purse, tug the red suitcase out from under the bed, and tiptoe out of the room. If he’s drunk, I could toss a chair against the wall and he wouldn’t stir, but my nerves make sure I remain as quiet as possible as I move down the hall and into the guest bedroom. 

Still in her day clothes as well, Arya lies sprawled atop the blankets in the exact position she had taken upon flopping down onto the bed not five minutes after getting home this evening. 

I stoop down next to the bed and give her shoulder a gentle shake, whispering her name. “Arya. . . Arya. . . Arya. . .” Another shake. “Arya.”

Grumbling low in her throat, Arya’s eyes peel open with a grimace. “Whatthe fug’s goin’ on?” she murmurs it her half-asleep daze. 

“Do you know where Jon’s staying?”

Her eyes flutter closed. “Huuuh? Who sayin’ what?”

“Arya.” I shake her once more and it seems to startle her enough to gain some level of consciousness. 

“Jesus. What?”

“Do you know where Jon is staying?”

Leaning up on her elbows, Arya rubs one eye with her fist while mumbling something incoherent under her breath. 

“Do you?” I ask again. 

“Why?”

“Can you just tell me, please?”

She finally turns her head to me and studies me and even in the dark I can see the suspicion in her grey eyes. “I don’t want you messing with his head.”

I let out a desperate sigh. “Please, just tell me where he is. I need to talk to him before I go.”

“Go where?”

Leaning closer to me, Arya peers down by my knees and sees the red suitcase I’d filled with the most important things I own and a few articles of clothing. 

“Away,” I answer.

* * * * *

Raising my left hand, void of the ring that almost always decorates it, I give room 417 a few quick knocks, in time with how quickly my heart races. For what feels like forever, I hear nothing and begin to wonder if I should just leave, but as I take the first step away from the door, I sense movement behind it. Louder and louder until I hear the deadbolt turn and the handle jiggle and then the door is creaking open. 

I swallow hard but it does nothing to ease my worries. 

“Dany? What are you doing here?” Jon asks, standing there in a wrinkled dress shirt untucked from his black pants. His hair is pulled behind his head and his eyes look red with sleep. 

“Hi,” I breathe, hands balled into fists inside my sweater pockets. 

“What time is it?” he asks, looking left and right down the hallway as if I’d brought an entourage. 

“I don’t know. Um. . . after midnight.” I curse myself silently for not taking into account the hour. I shouldn’t have wasted so much time sitting in my car outside of the hotel, making sure my makeup was just right to cover the bruises that decorate my neck and face. “I’m sorry. I should leave.” I turn on my heels but before I can make it a step, a hand curls around my arm and I’m suddenly halting in place. 

“Are you okay?” he asks, concerned. 

Slowly, I turn back to him. Even slower, I raise my eyes to his. “I just. . . There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you.”

His shoulders relax and his head nods like he’s been expecting this to happen, but he looks nervous as he steps aside to let me into his room. 

If this were a movie, I would have spoken my peace as soon as he opened the door in a dramatic fashion, passionately pressing my hand to my chest, voice raised without a care of other hotel guests hearing me. But this isn’t a movie and I’m just as afraid of what I have to say to him as he appears to be. It doesn’t help the mood either that Ghost immediately hops up from where he’d been lying on the carpet and bounces in front of me until I lean down and rake my fingers through his white fur. 

“Ghost, lay down,” Jon tells him in a meek command while giving the dog a pat on the back and as soon as the animal has settled back down in his spot, Jon asks me once more why I’m here. 

“I need to tell you something,” I repeat nervously. 

“You said that.”

“I know.” I avert my eyes down at the patterns in the carpet and once again try to swallow away my nerves, but they aren’t going anywhere. “I don’t know how to start.” 

“Just. . . start.”

“You kept saying you were sorry to me earlier.”

“I am sorry.”

“You don’t need to be, though. I don’t want you to be. I. . .” I take in a breath, deciding to just go for it, because it’s now or never, better late than never. “I never blamed you, Jon. Not for any of it. Everyone else did, and I let them. You did, and I let you. But I never blamed you. Not for one second. . . I did hate you, though. I hated you for what happened and for never coming to see me and for leaving and for never coming back. Especially for never coming back. I hated you for a long time for that. But, you need to understand, I _never_ blamed you, and I never. . .” I let out a breath, shaking my head down at the floor because I can’t say that part. It’s too hard and it’s too late. 

“Just because you never blamed me doesn’t mean it wasn’t my fault.”

My head shakes harder and the first of many tears escapes my eyes. “It wasn’t. It was an accident. And I told the police that, too. I told them. There was something in the road –”

“I shouldn’t have been driving.”

“There was something wrong before the crash, Jon. There was something _wrong_.” And the floodgates have opened. I press my palms to my eyes to try and force the emotions back down, but at this point there’s nothing I can do. Through my tearful gasps, I murmur “There was something wrong. There was something wrong.” 

I feel his warm arms wrap around me and I’m suddenly crying against his chest the way I’d done so with Robb only hours earlier, but I never curled myself around Robb like I do with Jon. I never clung to him. His shelter was always temporary and conditional. 

“I never blamed you, Jon, and I never. . .” I whisper as he lifts my head the way Robb had done, but rather than to force my lying eyes to look at his scorned ones, it is to run his thumbs across my wet cheeks and though it stings, I lean into his touch, letting my eyes flutter shut to pretend like the last ten years had never happened. Like we’re back on the top of that hill. I’m gazing up at the stars, tucked under his arm and rubbing my leg across his. 

“You never what?” he asks softly, and I think his voice has gotten deeper over the years, or maybe I had forgotten how somber and smooth it had been as he would try to get me to admit how much I love him. 

Opening my eyes, I reply “Longing for you.” 

His forehead comes to rest against mine and I can feel one of his own tears drip against my cheek to mingle with mine.

“Why did you marry him?”

My mouth goes dry and it takes me a full minute to reply. “Because you didn’t stop me.”

We part, taking steps back and I use my sleeve to rub the stale moisture from my face. I sit on the edge of the bed and stare ahead at the muted TV screen, suddenly too sad to feel nervous, even when he sits just beside me. 

For a while we sit in silence, until I begin to speak the thoughts that run through my mind. “Robb was there for me. I didn’t have anyone else. Just him. I think he tried harder to be good to me out of his anger toward you. I think he wanted to prove that he could be better for me than you and I was too trapped by grief to bother acknowledging that his love for me was just impassioned jealousy. When he proposed to me, I said yes because I didn’t know what else to do. If I’d said no, he would have left and I’d be all alone. But I never really wanted to go through with the wedding. Part of me thought that somehow you would find out about the engagement and it would make you come back. It sounds so stupid when I say it out loud – like, I can’t believe I’m even this person – but even right up until I said the words ‘I do,’ I was waiting for you to show up. And when you didn’t, I thought _fuck it_. I guess I’ll just be Robb’s wife for the rest of my life. Being his wife sounded so easy and it was for a while, until it wasn’t. Until I started wanting more. Until I started wishing you would show up again.”

“I couldn’t,” he quietly says. “I couldn’t show up. I couldn’t see you again.”

“Why not?”

“I thought –” he sighs. “I guess I was trapped by grief too. . . I still have that picture you gave me. The twenty-two-week ultrasound. I look at it when I’m drunk, which happens more often than I like to admit.”

I turn quickly to study his profile, flashes of graduation night flooding my brain once more. How could I have forgotten? I’d gone to the doctor alone the day before and got a print out to surprise him with. I’d asked him if he wanted to know the sex, already knowing his answer. 

“Can I see it?” I ask.

He goes to the nightstand and when he regains his spot on the bed beside me, he hands me the now-worn square photograph. Once upon a time I had a copy of the same one, but it’s long gone now. A part of me has always wondered if Robb got rid of it at some point, but I never asked, deciding it was best to try to forget about my son anyway, though I never could.

“It was a boy,” I breathe. 

“I know. One of the cops told me. Right before they told me he wasn’t mine, as if that meant I wanted to hurt him, or you.”

Sliding my hand into his, I squeeze. “He was yours.”

Pulling my hand into his lap, he stares down at it as he envelopes it with both of his. Even with a splint around his left hand, it’s the most comfort I’ve felt in a long time. “I think about him every day, you know. Maybe that’s weird. Maybe I should just –”

“It’s not weird.”

“I think about you every day, too. You look exactly the same.”

I find myself smile ever so slightly, watching his profile. “You look different. Not much, but enough.” I lift my other hand to graze my fingers against his whiskery cheek. “You smell the same, though.”

His own smile reveals itself, and I’d forgotten just how sweet and kind it was. “Is that good?”

“I’ve missed it,” I say.

“I’ve missed you.”

I lean in so close that the tip of my nose touches his cheek and I breathe in that scent that reminds me so much of love. So softly, I say “I’ve missed you, too” against his skin. 

His head turns and I can feel his warm breath against my lips just before I’m able to capture his with mine, so gentle it could hardly be considered a kiss. How long I’ve waited to feel those lips against mine. That tongue against mine. My chest heaves and my heart thumps. I want so badly to be consumed by him, to become a part of him, never to leave. But I’m still so scared. Scared that he’ll stop me, scared that he’ll run away, scared that he’ll tell me he doesn’t feel the same way about me as he did all those years ago. 

“But it feels like just yesterday,” I utter, just barely audible between chaste kisses. My knee on the mattress. My hands caressing the sides of his face. 

“What does?” he asks. 

“That you loved me.”

I feel his fingers slide against my neck until they tangle in my hair. And before he kisses me – a real sort of kiss like the ones he’d used to give me but sweeter, longer, firmer, more experienced – he replies “It _was_ just yesterday.” 

* * * * *

**JON**

I remember when my eyes blinked open in the early morning after graduation. On my back, rolled up in blankets and Dany’s body heat as she lay pressed against my side. Her eyes were still closed but I could tell by her breathing that she was close to wakefulness so I rolled onto my side and wrapped my arms around her until she was giggling against my bare chest. It was the first night we ever spent together in the five months we’d been together and waking up with her felt like a turn in our relationship, because I finally knew for certain that I wanted to wake up next to her for the rest of my life. 

But, the dreams of an eighteen-year-old are only those – dreams. 

The real world came crashing down on us, Dany most of all, not even an hour after we’d thrown our clothes back on and crawled out of that tent. We’d walked down to the creak again and I grimaced as Dany put her feet into the freezing cold water without a care in the world. 

Her cell had rung. Apparently, it had rung a couple of times during the night but we were too caught up in each other to remember anything else existed. Her feet were still in the water, ankles turning blue, as she answered the call and by the time she hung up and stepped up onto the rocks there were tears streaming from her eyes. 

It was about her uncle. A stroke in the middle of the night. I drove her straight to the hospital and watched through a pane of glass as she sat beside his bed while he slept, clutching his hand and resting her cheek on that plastic railing on the side of the bed. 

As much as I wish it were easy for me to be there for Dany, it was hard just standing in the hallway of Eugene Memorial, recalling all the hours I stood in a hallway much like it, wondering if I would ever again see my mom outside of her hospital room. But eventually, I went in. I pulled a chair up beside Dany and put my hand on her back. I thought she was asleep with how calmly she was breathing and how long her eyes had been closed, but as soon as my palm rested between her shoulder blades, she stirred, sitting up and leaning instead against my side, one hand still holding her uncle’s and the other coming to land on my leg. I don’t think either of us spoke one word the whole time we were there.

Over the course of a week, Aemon would drift in and out of sleep and Dany almost never left his side through it all which meant that I almost never left either. Though she never acknowledged it, Dany knew as well as the rest of us that her uncle’s chances of leaving the hospital were next to nothing and, eventually, she made the decision to finally reveal to him her pregnancy. 

Even blind and dying, I was afraid the entire time while she told him. When he asked who the father was, I wondered if he even knew I was in the room and I suddenly felt like an intruder. 

“Jon,” she’d answered. 

“Good,” he’d spoken, his voice haggard with fatigue. “I don’t want you to be alone, Daenerys. You need someone to take care of you, even if you think you don’t. A Targaryen alone in this world is a terrible thing.”

With tears in her eyes, she replied “I know. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m going to be okay.”

He was gone not a week later. Cremated. The Targaryens were never buried, rather they gave their bodies to fire, disintegrating what remains of them before the Earth could ravage them over the course of years, rotting in a wooden box among the worms and roaches and oils from all the other decomposing corpses in a garden of bones. At least, that was how Dany put it as I drove her to pick up the ashes, but as she stared down at the cardboard box they had given her, like picking up a package from the post office, she said it didn’t seem much better. 

“What do I do with them? Keep them?” she asked me. 

“You could. You could get something a little nicer to put them in, or I guess you could scatter them, like, somewhere he liked to go.”

“He didn’t really go many places, and he didn’t mention anywhere in particular. I just. . . I don’t think I can keep them. I don’t think I can look at them every day. And what if I lose them?”

“How would you lose them?”

“I don’t know! By being careless!” 

Her eyes filled once more with tears, breaking into another spontaneous fit of crying that I’d grown accustomed to and she didn’t stop until I pulled my car up the path into Benjen’s plot of land. “Why are we here?” she asked, sniffling against her sleeve. 

“Come on,” I told her. “And bring him.”

Clutching the flimsy box of ashes to her chest, she got out of the car and stepped carefully through the grass. 

“Maybe there wasn’t any place in particular that he liked, but you like it here, right?”

She nodded. 

“Where’s your favorite spot on the property?”

After a moment, she answered “The creak.”

“Okay. Then how about scattering his ashes over the creak. That way, every time you walk down to put your feet in the water, you’ll think of him, and every time you sit on the rocks, it’ll be like you’re sitting right next to him.”

She hadn’t smiled, but the nod she gave was the first expression of contentment I’d seen on her since learning of her uncle’s stroke. 

We walked the trail down to our favorite spot and I watched Dany open up the box and spill its contents across the water and the soil and the rocks. When she sat beside me, I rested a hand on her shoulder and they felt deflated of tension, her face radiating a new sort of tranquility. And then she smiled. First at the moving water, and then at me before taking my hand and moving it down to her belly, hidden under that sweatshirt I gave her what felt like years before. The baby was kicking with all of its twenty-four weeks of strength. 

But then her smile was replaced by uncertainty. “Jon,” she whispered “what are we going to do?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, are we going to stay here? If we stay here, eventually we’ll have to tell everyone that we’re together, and about the baby. If we leave, where are we going to go? What are we going to do there?”

I swallowed, trying to recall all of those late-night brainstorming sessions thinking up various elaborate strategies for just how we were going to play all of this off without anyone ever suspecting the genetic origins of our child. But, as I sat there with my arm around Dany and her cheek upon my shoulder, I confessed that “I have no idea.”

“Do you want to stay here, or do you want to go someplace else?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, which really meant ‘I want to run someplace far away and start a new life and family with you without ever having to worry about anyone trying to ruin that, but I get the feeling that you want to stay, so I’m going to just reply _I don’t know_ instead.’

“We have to figure it out, soon. I’m going to have to move out of my house if the rent isn’t paid next month. I need to know if I need to find a job here in town, in Eugene, or in another city entirely. We need to decide what we’re going to do.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll figure it out,” I replied with a quiet confidence, but the words were easier said than done. 

* * * * *

Our mouths do not part until Dany is already on her back below me, her fingers softly tracing the hairs along my jaw. Somehow my fingers had found their way underneath her dress and are grazing along the slightly raised scar running horizontally across her abdomen.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. 

“Jon, I told you –” she begins softly. 

“I don’t mean I’m sorry for what I did, I mean I’m sorry for what happened to you – for what you had to go through.”

“I’m sorry for what happened to you, too. It wasn’t fair. You didn’t do anything wrong. And I promise, Jon, I told them it was an accident.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not.” Suddenly, she’s sliding out from under me, scooting to sit on the edge of the bed and smoothing her dress down over her thighs. With her back to me, she says “I kept waiting for you to come back, but that was stupid. I should have just left a long time ago. I should have tried to find you. Somehow, though, the thought of leaving this place felt as terrifying as walking into a burning building or jumping off a cliff.”

“It’s okay,” I repeat.

“It’s not,” she repeats, then twists to look at me once more. “It’s not okay. Nothing has been okay.”

To such a statement, there are so many things I wish to ask, but none sound appropriate at a time like this, when I am finally alone with Dany for the first time in ten years. So, instead, I crawl to her, take her face in my hands and look into her deep, blue eyes. Softly, I profess “I love you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true.”

“I don’t deserve it.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I disagree.”

“I don’t care.”

“Jon –”

“Dany.”

Her bottom lip quivers and her hands come to rest over mine as they rest over her cheeks. “I love you, too.”

Once again, I come to rest my forehead against hers, feeling its heat mesh with my own, and a minute later her lips tenderly nip at my own and we are back to kissing, slow and sweet, until my hands move from her face to her hips and I’m pulling her on top of me. 

I don’t know what’s wrong with me that I am so quick to betray the last stitches of familial obligation that still reside inside of my soul, but while Robb doesn’t mean nothing to me, Dany means everything to me. 

So sweet is her tongue inside my mouth and so silky is her breast under the palm of my hand. So agonizing is the pressure building below my waist as Dany presses her hips against mine. I turn us over and as soon as I’ve made the decision to say _fuck it_ and dive right into the deep end, ridding Dany of that black dress, her only response is to eagerly curve her leg around my hip, kiss me deeper, and pop button after button down my shirt until I finally feel her bare skin against my own. 

The air conditioner rattles as our sweat comingles and slippery hands touch every inch of each other. The only words spoken the rest of the night are uttered through slow waves of ecstasy into the dimly lit hotel room as our limbs tangle and our mouths drink each other in. I find that while loving Daenerys Targaryen all these years has been like suffering one long death, loving her tonight feels like a resurrection.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic contains a lot of angst, mature/triggering themes (including death/loss and domestic abuse), and characters who are misguided, depressed and flawed. I hope you enjoy this work, but if you do not, I understand and respect that. If at any point this work is not to your liking, I will not be offended if you choose to stop reading. I have rated this fic "Mature" for a reason. To reiterate: It's just a story. I wrote it for my own personal enjoyment and creative growth and do not expect it to appeal to all readers. Enjoy, or don't. No pressure.
> 
> (**Note for this chapter: While proofreading Chapter 7 I realized that it and Chapter 8 really should be one chapter. However, it would be an extremely long chapter and too long for me to proofread all at once what with my hectic holiday schedule. So it was either delay posting for possibly another few days in order to proofread both chapters together - I read these chapters over like 3 times before I post them and I am a slooow reader lol - or just post them the way they were originally broken up. I chose the latter.)

**DANY**

I trace the tip of my finger over the beads of sweat that decorate the side of Jon’s face, like painting with watercolors, and then press a kiss to his cheek to make him turn over and pull me against him. Only a single sheet survived our sexual reunion. The rest of the bed’s covers lie in a heap on the floor, underneath Ghost’s sleeping form. 

“Are you tired?” I ask in a murmur against Jon’s neck before pressing a kiss there as well. 

Squeezing me tight against his hot flesh, he says “Not one bit.”

I smile. “Me either.”

Jon hums under his breath. “Well. . . are you hungry?”

Looking up at him, my cheeks blush pink, embarrassed somehow by the fact that I’m starving at nearly two in the morning when I hadn’t eaten dinner, or lunch really, or even breakfast for that matter. 

“Room service?” he asks with a half-smile. 

* * * * *

“One turkey croissant sandwich with lettuce and cheese!” Jon announced as soon as he came in the front door of my house, holding a paper grocery bag up like a torch, triumphantly. “One family-sized bag of barbeque Lays and one king-sized cookies-and-cream Hershey’s bar!”

Letting out a massive sigh of relief, I push myself off of the sofa to parlay with Jon at the kitchen table where he’d begun unpacking the foods the baby had been making me crave all day. 

“Oh my God, thank you so much. If I didn’t already love you. . .” I ripped open the bag of chips and shoved one after the other into my mouth as if I was near starvation, which it honestly felt like I was. My eyes took a good look at the rest of my dinner until they examined the label on the pre-made grocery store sandwich. I must not have hid my reaction well, because Jon immediately asked what was wrong.

“Nothing. Thank you.”

“What is it?”

Shoving more chips into my mouth, I shake my head. “Nothing.”

“You look disappointed.” 

“I’m not. It’s just that you accidentally got the chicken salad croissant sandwich instead of the turkey croissant sandwich.”

“What?” He took a better look at the sandwich, boxed in plastic. “Shit. Well they look almost identical. I can go back.”

“No. It’s fine.”

“You’ll still eat it?”

Scrunching my nose, I say “Well, I don’t like chicken salad.”

“I’ll go back.” He picks his keys back up, but I put my hand on his arm to stop him.

“Don’t, Jon. It’s fine. I have chips.”

“You can’t just eat chips.”

“I won’t. I also have candy.” When he gave me a disagreeable look, I add with a smile “I ate healthy yesterday. Remember? That salad with all the spinach and then that weird Quinoa crap?”

“Alright,” he said with a skeptical stare before pulling a subway sandwich out of the grocery bag and settling down in the seat across the table from me.

My stomach growled. “You went to subway? I didn’t know you were going to go to subway.”

“Nothing at the store looked good to me.”

As he unwrapped the foot-long sandwich, the smells of meat, cheese, pickles and mustard fill my senses. “Can I have some?”

With a sly smile and a chuckle, he shook his head. “No way.”

“But I can’t just eat chips and candy.”

He shrugged. “You ate healthy yesterday.”

Pouting, I asked “But what about the baby?”

“The baby can have a bite.” He handed me one half of the sandwich but before I could take a bite, he gave me a stern look and said “Just remember that this bite is for the baby. Not for you. You are to get no enjoyment out of this sandwich.”

Cheeks pink and smile wicked, I took as big a bite as I could fit into my mouth and then handed the sandwich back to Jon, who was shaking his head and blinking slowly at my antics. My mouth was so full I could hardly chew, and I had to hold my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing and spilling semi-masticated food everywhere. 

“Wow, so beautiful,” said Jon like he was trying to be sarcastic, but the smile he’d adopted while trying not to laugh betrayed his attempt at insincerity. 

Once I finally swallowed everything down, I held my bag of chips out to him as a peace offering. 

As we ate, I told Jon all about the new things I’d learned from the small collection of baby books I’d bought used online and giggled whenever he would act like he was going to puke every time I mentioned something gross like the after-birth or an episiotomy. 

I was half way through with my bag of chips when the cramps started up again and I had to press my hand against the underside of my swollen belly to sooth the abrupt pain. 

“What’s wrong?” Jon asked, looking more worried than I thought was warranted. He always looked like the sky was falling any time I had the slightest ache or pain, insisting that we call the doctor every time I had a headache or upset stomach. 

“Nothing.” I took a deep breath and focused my attention on my chips rather than the pain. “Just some cramps. They come and go. It’s not a big deal. It’s normal, so don’t worry about it.”

“Are you sure?” His eyes were still wild with worry, but he had yet to leap from the table in sheer panic, so there was still time to save myself from an evening of unnecessary calls to my doctor or worse, an entire night spend in the Emergency Room before a random doctor finally visits with me long enough to say I’m perfectly fine and the cramps are perfectly normal. 

I smiled to show him I was fine and either way, the pain had been starting to fade just as it usually did after a minute or so. “I promise I’m fine. Fat, but fine.”

He stood, rounding the table until he was right behind me, wrapping his arms around my shoulders from behind so that I could rest my chin on his forearm. “You’re supposed to be fat, Dany. That’s how we know it’s working.”

Rubbing my hands over my rounded belly, I said “Oh it’s working alright. Just ten more weeks now and then it’ll be all diapers and toys and breastmilk.”

“My three favorite things.”

I turned my head up to see Jon was cringing and deeply regretting his own joke. Laughing at him only made it easier to dismiss the pain. For his sake, I changed the subject and I told him how I’d spoken to my uncle’s landlord. “He said I could stay another month to find someplace else to live, but that’s all he can spare before moving in a new tenant. I was thinking, maybe I could get one of those part-time receptionist jobs in Eugene or something. We could get a little apartment there.”

Back in his seat across the table from me, Jon replies “Actually, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something for a couple of days now. It isn’t a sure thing yet, but it could be soon.”

“What is it?”

“How would you like to live in Los Angeles?”

“Los Angeles? Why? What is there to do in Los Angeles?”

“What _isn’t_ there to do in Los Angeles? Benjen has an old friend there who owns some real estate development group or something. He thinks he can get me a job there working on houses and buildings and stuff. It’ll probably be a lot of grunt work and manual labor, but it sounds awesome. Don’t you think?”

Chewing on my bottom lip, I wonder silently about what it would be like to just leave the only place I’ve ever known. I’d never even been out of the greater Eugene area let alone outside of Oregon state. 

No doubt sensing my trepidation, Jon continued to try and sell me. “It’ll be a brand new start for us, Dany. A big new city full of people we’ve never met before. We can get a cute apartment in a Spanish style building right next to a Starbucks and one of those little markets that only sells fruit. You could go to school and take those business classes you want to take.”

“But we can do all of that in Eugene, Jon.”

His shoulders dropped. “I thought you wanted to get away from here.”

“We would be getting away from here. We’d be moving to the city.”

“Thirty miles from here is not getting away.”

“Why not?”

I could see Jon growing annoyed, or maybe he was just disappointed. I hadn’t realized until later how excited he was about the prospect of us living in Los Angeles, or how excited he was about the job. In my fear-driven desire to remain as close to familiarity as possible, I forgot in that moment that Jon’s dream was to build houses from the ground up. 

“What about the baby?” he asked. 

“What _about_ the baby?”

“Well, what happens when, while we’re living in Eugene, we run into someone from town – the two of us, together, with a baby – and that person tells someone else from town, who tells someone else from town, and soon everyone knows, including Robb? What do you think is going to happen then?”

“I don’t know. Why would he do anything?”

“Really, Dany? You don’t think he’d be curious as to why our child’s age is exactly nine months older than the day you last slept with him? You don’t think he’d want to stop by and check on things? Maybe want to do a paternity test? Maybe get a lawyer?”

I remember scowling at him for that, folding my arms over my chest and glaring at his exasperate expression. I hated how he was speaking to me like I was stupid, even though I was being stupid.

“You’re being mean, Jon,” I told him plainly. 

“I’m being practical.”

“You’re being paranoid, like you always are, and it’s getting really annoying.”

“I’m annoying? This was all your idea, Dany. You wanted us to raise this kid together. You wanted me to be the father. You wanted to not tell Robb –”

“You wanted all of those things too!” I shouted defensively.

“—and all I’m doing is trying to make sure that happens. To make sure what you want happens. And you find that annoying?”

My head was spinning from the confrontation, my frown turning to a grimace as the pain in my abdomen returned, like a sharp crank churning inside my uterus. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. It’s giving me a migraine.

“Yeah, I don’t really want to talk about this anymore either,” Jon replied, standing once more from his seat, but instead of coming around the table to give me a strong, soothing embrace, he picked up his car keys and headed for the door. 

“You’re actually going to leave?!” I called out to him, voice slightly strained from the pain. 

“I’m going to get your fucking sandwich!” he called back. 

“I don’t want the sandwich!” I replied, but he was already outside, the front door swinging shut behind him. 

I groaned, dropping my forehead to the table and clenching my teeth, waiting impatiently for the pain to subside.

* * * * *

**JON**

Sitting cross-legged atop the hotel bed, I hold my hands out in front of me, palms down and parallel to the mattress, my eyes staring intently into Dany’s as if trying to read her mind. Dany, seated in the same fashion before me, raises an eyebrow as her smile turns devilish. A moment later, her hands are jutting forward in an attempt to smack the backs of mine, but I’m too swift for her, pulling them back and leaving her to swat at air. 

“Crap,” she hisses under her breath. “How are you so good at this game?”

I laugh and return my hands to their previous position. “I have no idea.”

“We probably shouldn’t even be playing this,” she says while regaining her position as well. “What the heck happened to your hand anyway?”

“Hammer,” I reply, earning me a questioning look. “I was on the roof of this house I was fixing up in Redondo Beach and –”

The backs of my hands meet with a sharp slap and I’m gasping in surprise and also the buzzing pain in my injured hand. I clutch it to my chest and stare at Dany with my mouth agape like I can’t believe she actually did that. 

“Oh my God, Jon, I’m sorry!” she exclaims, pulling my splinted hand toward her and pressing her lips atop of it in a nurturing way. 

I chuckle and say “My turn.”

She lets out a small gasp of her own. “You can’t! You’re going to break my hand with your broken hand!”

Before we can square up, though, there is a light knocking on the room door and both of our eyes perk up with the prospect of a very-late night dinner. 

We’re already dressed. Me in jeans and her in one of my t-shirts and the flannel pajama pants I’m almost always too lazy to put on before falling asleep. Her feet stepped on the bottoms of the pant legs as she walked to the door with me. 

Once the food – cheeseburgers and fries – are on the hotel table, I tip the delivery person and flip on the overhead light. With the room now filled with yellow light and Dany tying her long, tousled hair with a band being her head, I get a better look at her porcelain skin and every slight discoloration upon it. 

She is half way through chewing her first bite of burger when I ask “Did I do that?” and pointing toward the faint marks along her neck. 

Swallowing so hard I can hear the gulp, she brings her fingers to the marks and shakes her head. I don’t inquire further only because I’m now noticing more discoloration upon her cheek. 

“What’s that?” I ask. “What happened?” But before I finish getting the question out, she rises quickly from her chair and hurries to her purse, rummaging through it until she retrieves a compact. Looking in the little mirror, she uses the flat sponge inside to dab foundation onto the blemished skin. 

“Dany. . .”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says in a melancholic plea, stashing her compact back into her purse and looking at me.

I stand, suddenly not hungry anymore. “Did Robb do that?”

“I don’t want to talk about –”

“Because of the hug?”

“Please, Jon. I don’t want to talk about it. It doesn’t matter.”

“How can you say it doesn’t matter? Did he hit you?”

“I’m fine, Jon.”

“Don’t do that, Dany. Don’t just say you’re fine when you’re not. You always do that. You never want to just admit that something might be wrong so you pretend everything is fine, and then –”

“Then _what?_ ” she asks, growing stone-faced before me. 

Then. . . utter destruction. If she hadn’t downplayed the cramps, if she had just told me that the pain was severe, if she had just allowed me to try to help her then I never would have left. I never would have gone back to the grocery store to buy that sandwich for the sole purpose of getting to be a passive aggressive asshole to Dany once I’d return with it. I never would have ran into a couple of Robb’s old teammates in the parking lot without the mental strength to come up with a good excuse not to get roped into a conversation with them, gossip mainly. 

They were tipsy, drinking beer and airplane bottles of liquor while perched up in the bed of a pick-up truck. One of them handed me a bottle of rum as he went on about how slutty some cheerleader was in high school that I never met. He didn’t offer it to me, he just put it in my hand like I’d asked for it, and for some reason, I drank it. And when he put another into my hand, I drank that one too. Half way through the third, my phone began to buzz in my pocket. A call from Dany, as if she could sense I was up to no good.

“I’ve got to go,” I remember muttering to my drinking buddies. They hadn’t heard my words, or even noticed that I stepped away, walking toward my car as I answered Dany’s call.

“What is it, Dany?” I spoke, a bit too gruff, but I wanted her to know I was still unhappy about our conversation. 

“Are you still at the store?” she’d asked. 

“Leaving now.” I threw back the remaining contents of the bottle, beginning to enjoy the harsh taste.

“Jon, I’m sorry, alright? You’re right. I want to go to Los Angeles.”

Upon hearing these words, all of the animosity I retained flowed out of my body as easily as it had entered. It was as though my mind was doing a complete one-eighty. Suddenly, my tone shifted and I was asking her with a quiet sincerity “Are you sure? I thought you wanted to stay close to home.”

“I don’t know what I’m trying to hold onto here. There’s nothing here for me now.”

“I just want to keep us safe, Dany. I want to protect our family.”

“I know. And I know you really want to take that job. I want you to. I think I could like it in LA, too. I’ve always wanted to live next to a Starbucks.”

Looking back, I think I could hear the tension in her voice. The strain. The inflection that told my ears that she was speaking these words while in the midst of a painful episode, but my brain couldn’t process it. I was too joyous over Dany finally seeing my point, delighted by the idea of us actually moving to LA together, and somewhat lightheaded from the quick succession of drinks I’d just taken. I knew I shouldn’t have been driving, but I only had to get to Dany’s house, and it was late enough in the night that the roads would be traffic-free. And all I wanted to do in that moment was to get home to her as quickly as possible, danger be damned. 

Indeed, if Dany had told me before I left for that grocery store how bad her pain was, that crash may never have happened, but what happened after the crash was all my fault. Penance for taking those three drinks of rum or whatever it was in that parking lot to ease my tensions mind. And maybe if I hadn’t taken those drinks, I would have been sharp enough to put the breaks on in time and I never would have needed to abruptly spin the steering wheel as not to smash into whatever large animal was standing in the middle of the road. Maybe the alcohol had affected me more than I thought it had.

And now I’ve made another mistake. A mistake of words. But Dany’s disposition softens before I can apologize. 

“It doesn’t matter because I’m not going back to him,” she tells me. “My suitcase is in the car. I was going to go to the airport after talking to you, but. . . we ended up doing more than that.”

“Where are you going?” I ask just above a whisper, instinctively taking a step closer to her, suddenly afraid of being apart from her again, even if only by a few feet. 

“I’ve had a place in mind for a while. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, though.”

“What do you mean?”

She remains silent for some time, her arms curling around her torso, hugging herself in a way that makes me want to hug her instead, but I refrain for now, to give her the least bit of space I can manage. 

“About two years ago, I became pregnant again,” she eventually confesses. 

“Arya told me. I’m so sorry, Dany.”

“It was a mistake,” she says. “Robb thought we were trying to get pregnant, but he was the only one trying. Robb had been making me take home pregnancy tests every week and one day, it came up positive. He was so excited, but I was. . . I’d gotten so good at pretending to be happy with him, but pretending that I was happy about that almost killed me. Anytime he wasn’t in the house, all I’d do was cry. Just existing while knowing I was pregnant made me feel like I was dying, like I’d been diagnosed with some terminal illness. When I found out Robb was going to visit Bran for a couple of days, I made an appointment at this clinic and when Robb came home, I told him I’d had a miscarriage.” A tear escapes her eye and slides down her cheek to drip from her chin. “And the thing is, when I left the clinic, it was like the massive boulder crushing my chest had finally been removed and I could actually breath. I felt lighter. I felt genuine peace. I can’t be pregnant again, Jon. I just can’t. I didn’t want to have a baby with Robb, but more than that, I _can’t_ be pregnant again.” She takes a moment to duck her head and blot at her eyes with the hem of the shirt she wears. “If I could have gotten my tubes tied without Robb finding out, I would have. I’m sorry.”

I don’t know why she would apologize to me for that, but I tell her it’s okay anyway. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, Dany,” I say, taking another step closer to her until there are no more steps left between us.

“A month after the first procedure, I bought a plane ticket to Los Angeles,” she says quietly, unwilling to meet my gaze. 

“You did?”

She nods. “I didn’t even make it to the airport. I think that was the day Robb got the stomach flu. A couple of month later, I bought another one, also to LA. Same story except instead of a stomach flu it was a flat tire on the interstate and I had to go pick him up. Every time I would get close to finally leaving, I would find a reason why it wasn’t the right time. But after the second procedure. . . I realized that it’s never going to be a good time, and that I couldn’t keep living like that. I had a flight booked on the afternoon of the day Benjen died.”

“To LA?”

Again, she nods somberly. “How the fuck was I supposed to leave then? He wasn’t just Robb’s uncle. He was your uncle, too. How was I supposed to leave on the day that he died?” She spins around so that I won’t see her cry into her palms. I don’t even think about it before I’m enveloping her in my arms, my lips pressed against the back of her head as I breath in the scent of her hair, my own eyes feeling watery. 

“But I don’t want you to think I’m leaving him for you,” she speaks through her sniffles. “I can’t leave him for you. I have to leave him for me. But. . . I don’t know. . . I thought that if I finally made it to LA, maybe I could see you again. And depending on your situation – maybe we could hang out again like we used to when we were kids, except I would be single of course. I wanted to do things the right way for once. I don’t know. . .”

“I know,” I whisper before kissing her head once more. “I want to do things the right way, too.”

* * * * *

As soon as I pulled up to the curb outside her house, Dany was coming out onto the porch, leaning against the railing and wearing an anguished expression. I had thought she was simply still upset about me having left, so I just gave her a smile and a kiss on the cheek to show her I wasn’t angry anymore. 

“I got your sandwich, babe,” I told her. 

“Have you been drinking?” she asked me, somewhat out of breath like she’d just returned from a jog around the block. 

“No,” I replied, a bit too defensively.

“Jon –”

“A drank a little, but I’m okay. Let’s go inside.”

I moved into the house, but Dany never followed me. When I turned around, she was bent over, one hand on her belly and the other holding onto the doorframe. In that moment, it felt as though all of the alcohol was seeping out of my system in the form of a panicked sweat. Nothing about her posture looked right and in a split second I was connecting all of the dots until they added up to a dangerous conclusion. 

Hurrying back to her, I took her arm so that she could lean against me instead. “Dany? What’s wrong?”

“I’m fine. Just cramps again.”

“Still? When did the pain start this time?”

“Like ten minutes ago or something.”

“Ten minutes?!” I exclaimed loud enough to cause Dany to flinch. “That’s a long time, Dany. Isn’t that a long time? Does that mean something’s wrong?”

“I don’t know, Jon, I’m not a doctor.” I could hear the eyeroll in her tone, but that didn’t deter my anxiety. 

“Okay, well I’m going to call the doctor.” I pulled out my cell and started dialing. 

“I’m fine, Jon! It’s fine! The pain is settling, Jon! And it’s late! Don’t bother him!” she protested. 

I kept one ear plugged and the other listening intently to my phone as I relayed Dany’s condition to the doctor. Tiredly, he suggested that we may want to go to the Emergency Room just in case and despite his flippant demeanor, as soon as I heard the words ‘Emergency Room’ it felt like all the blood in my body had rushed to my feet. 

Snapping my phone shut, I twisted about like I had lost Dany even though she was right in front of me. When my panicked eyes finally focused on her, I exclaimed “We need to go to the ER!”

“What?” she asked incredulously, standing straighter. “Jon, I told you! I’m fine! It’s gone! I’m fine now!”

But I wouldn’t listen to her. The doctor said to go to the Emergency Room and I had to take her. Except that she wouldn’t let me. 

“You’re not driving, Jon! You’re drunk!” she shouted at me, smacking me on the arm as I tried to urge her into the passenger seat. 

“I’m not drunk! I’m fine!”

“Well I’m fine, too! So let’s just stay here!”

“No. We have to go. I’ll call an ambulance.”

“Jon!” She snatched my phone out of my hand as soon as I pulled it from my pocket. “You’re being paranoid! It was just cramps! It’s normal and it’s stopped anyway!” I reached for my phone, but she stretched her arm out and away from me, saying “I can’t afford a bill for an ambulance ride, Jon!” And then she let out an annoyed sigh and relented. “Fine, okay, you can take me to the hospital, but I’m driving.”

“You can’t drive, Dany. You’re pregnant.”

She sent me a glare as she rounded the car to the driver’s door and snapped her fingers at me, a signal to get into the passenger seat. Dany had always been so good at snapping her fingers. A snap of her fingers and she could get me to do anything, literally. 

I hear that snap just before my eyes flood with morning sunlight streaming in through the sheer curtain across the hotel window. Stretching my arms out, I feel no other bodies beside me and my brow furrows. Surely I hadn’t imagined the entire night. 

Before my eyes can fully adjust to reality, Ghost leaps onto the vacant half of the bed, the very place where I watched Dany drift off to sleep at three in the morning, looking so delicate in my clothes. The way my dog bounces and spins atop the mattress, tangling his legs in the sheets and making the pillow slip onto the floor, I can tell it must be well past time for him to go out for a bathroom break. And indeed, the clock on the nightstand reads 10:47. 

In a moment, I realize I’ve got an 11AM checkout time and quickly roll out of bed and stumbling to my feet. As I throw what few belongings I brought with me back into my duffel bag, I talk to Ghost, like I tend to do when I’m frazzled. “You saw her, right?” I ask him. “There are two plates on the table. I didn’t eat two burgers on my own, did I? Yeah, I guess it wouldn’t be the first time I did that, would it? But she was here. I know she was.”

I find the t-shirt and pants I had given Dany to wear last night draped over the desk chair and pause my scrambling to pick up and press the fabric to my nose. It smells like her.

“Where did she go?” I ask in a confused whisper before my mind recalls her plans. She was on her way to the airport. She hadn’t intended to stay the night, only a few minutes to speak her peace. Letting the air out of my lungs, I close my eyes and allow my head and heart to fill with hope that I will see her in Los Angeles. 

After hurriedly checking out of the hotel, I walk the mile back to the bar where Arya and I had gotten tipsy at the day before with my small duffel bag thrown over my shoulder and Ghost leashed and trotting along beside me. Just before we reach the rustic looking tavern, my phone rings with a number a don’t recognize. I answer quickly, wondering for a moment if it could be Dany. 

“Hello. Is this Mr. Jon Snow?” a man’s voice inquires on the other end, causing my brow to furrow. 

“Yeah. Who’s this?”

“My name is Tyrion Lannister. I am an attorney here in Eugene. Benjen Stark placed me in charge of his affairs in the event of his untimely passing. I’m very sorry for your loss, by the way. He was your uncle, is that right?”

“Yeah. Thank you. What sort of affairs are you talking about? Like, a will?”

“Precisely, Mr. Snow. I had helped your uncle write up a will a number of years ago. I had thought it a little premature to worry about such things at his age and state of health, but he insisted, and I suppose it is a good thing he had, given his very unfortunate and sudden passing. I’m wondering if you could come down to my office sometime today.”

“Well, I was going to drive back home to California today.”

“We can certainly have the deed transferred to you remotely, but it would be a much more efficient process if you could come in and speak with me in person.”

“Deed? What do you mean?”

“Are you aware that your uncle owned a very substantial piece of land on Crescent Road about twenty or so miles outside Eugene?”

“Yeah, of course. . .” The confused expression doesn’t leave my face until my brain finally puts the pieces together of what this lawyer is telling me. 

“So, do you think you could come to my office today?” Mr. Lannister asks again.

My mind reels. Not just with the sudden realization that Benjen had obviously left me his acreage in his will, but also all of those bittersweet memories of Dany sitting out by that creak on one of those big rocks, or rested on her bag atop a thick towel, or standing with her feet in the freezing cold water like it was somehow soothing. Memories of us cuddling and fucking and sleeping together in that tent on graduation night. Memories of us jokingly making plans to live in a tent just like that at the top of that very hill. But no fish for breakfast, because Dany doesn’t like fish.

After scribbling the address of Mr. Lannister’s office onto the back of an expired Dairy Queen receipt, I punch it into my truck’s GPS and take off. But, as I reach the freeway on-ramp, I find I’m turning North rather than South, in the direction of Crescent Road.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic contains a lot of angst, mature/triggering themes (including death/loss and domestic abuse), and characters who are misguided, depressed and flawed. I hope you enjoy this work, but if you do not, I understand and respect that. If at any point this work is not to your liking, I will not be offended if you choose to stop reading. I have rated this fic "Mature" for a reason. To reiterate: It's just a story. I wrote it for my own personal enjoyment and creative growth and do not expect it to appeal to all readers. Enjoy, or don't. No pressure.

**DANY**

I awaken as beams of sunlight are just beginning to brighten the hotel room. I can’t have slept more than four hours, but somehow I feel more refreshed than I have in a long time. Turning onto my side, I watch Jon’s bare chest rise and fall, slow and steady, as he inhales and exhales through his nose. He lies on his back in just the way I remember he would so many years ago, head turned to the side and one arm raised to rest on the pillow beside it. His eyes are moving behind their lids, a sign of an animated dream. So badly, I wish to curl up against him, rest my head on his chest and drape my arm across his waist, but I don’t want to interrupt his peaceful slumber. 

When I slide out of bed, I have to step carefully, tip-toeing around Ghost who lies in a deep sleep of his own on the carpet beside the bed. In the bathroom, I take a long look at myself in the mirror, disheveled hair and drowning in too-big clothes, but somehow I find I’m attractive to my own eyes, like this is how I’m meant to look just after waking up. I decide to take a shower, and once that’s finished, I change back into my dress and leggings and step out to find Jon has not stirred one bit in my absence, nor has Ghost even. 

As I run my fingers through my damp hair, I wonder about my next move. The airport, I suppose. It wouldn’t be fair to leave Eugene with Jon. Not fair to myself or for Jon. If we were going to do things the right way, I’d have to leave on my own. I’d have to feel what it would be like to actually be alone for once in my life, taking care of myself and learning how to enjoy being myself again.

But, I can’t just leave either. Now that the sun is up, there is something I must do before I bid this final farewell to the only place I’ve ever called home.

I take a napkin from the room service tray and write out a note to Jon, leaving it atop the pillow where my head had rested beside his just a half hour before. After, I slip into my shoes and sweater, collect my purse, and slide out of the hotel room as silently as possible. 

* * * * *

Cold and damp is the boulder I’ve been sitting on for nearly two hours now, hugging my knees as I shiver under the cold shade of the trees behind me. I stare at the water rushing over smooth rocks down the creak where I once sprinkled my uncle’s ashes. It must be snowing in the mountains because the water level is high and raging faster. 

Water. 

That is the last memory I have of mine and Jon’s teenage romance. Not his eyes or his calloused hand clutched in mine, but _water._

I’d been taking surface streets into Eugene because I wasn’t a strong driver even without the sporadic pain in my pelvis. It was only a thirty-mile drive to the hospital but seemed to take forever as I drove slowly down the deserted country roads where street lamps were few and far between. 

“Are you okay?” He kept asking me between giving unnecessary directions of when to turn left and right. Each time, I would reply that I was fine, but soon I was saying it through gritted teeth. 

“I want to go back home, Jon,” I would fearfully insist, the pain growing harsher and harder to conceal.

 

And then it was like someone had driven an ice pick through my abdomen and I couldn’t help but suck in a sharp gasp, releasing the steering wheel to bring my hands to my body as if I were gushing blood from an invisible stab wound. 

“Dany!” Jon shouted, his voice like an echo from the far end of a long hallway, as the car swerved off the road and I released my foot from the gas. 

We rolled to a stop in a dirt patch between the road and vacant farmland. 

“Dany, what’s wrong?” he asked in a panic but all I could respond with was a pained groan as I grabbed his arm and dug my fingernails into his arm. 

But in a moment, the pain had dissipated enough that I was able to tell him once more, unconvincingly, that I was fine. I got out of the car to breathe in some fresh air, but as soon as I stood up straight, the ice pick sensation returned, twisting into my expanded uterus. I was freezing, but sweating. 

The world was spinning as I crumpled to the ground, but I could just faintly hear Jon’s panicked voice beside me announce that he was calling for an ambulance.

“Okay, okay, okay, okay,” I chanted rhythmically with closed eyes as if the repetition could somehow distract me from the very real feeling like I was going to die right there on the side of that dark and desolate road. 

But then he said something about his phone not having any service and then I heard him looking through my purse for my phone, which proved to be useless as well. 

“Come on, baby,” he said before lifting me up, scooping me up like I really was a baby, and I remember feeling lifeless in his arms save for the excruciating pain that made me wish I were lifeless. 

I remember wanting so badly to scream, but not being able to. Like something had broken apart inside of me and the brokenness was spreading, destroying every piece of me, including my ability to make sounds. 

As Jon was buckling me into the passenger seat, he kept telling me everything was going to be okay, that I was going to be fine, that everything was going to be fine. But the way he spoke the words told me that everything wasn’t fine. Nothing was fine. The pain wouldn’t subside like it had before and every rock Jon would drive over sent another shock of pain burrowing deeper through my insides. I could feel wetness between my legs, but before I could discern if it was blood or not, an image outside the windshield stole my attention – an animal growing larger and larger in the headlight beams in a matter of a second. 

My throat finally allowed me to scream.

A moment later, I was jerked to one side, my head bouncing off the side window so harshly that a loud cracking sound rung in my ears. The sight of water kicking up against the windshield filled my vision before I was jerked forward and my mind was thrust into an impenetrable, painless blackness. 

The next time my eyes opened, I was lying in a hospital bed and four days had passed. I had a splitting headache, a broken arm, a long incision scar over an empty womb, no son and no Jon. 

The tear that slides down my cheek is the first bit of warmth I’ve felt since leaving my car hours ago and I feel utterly unworthy of its grace. I never told anyone, not even Jon, but I wanted to name him Aemon, after my uncle. Aemon Jon Targaryen-Snow. We could have called him AJ for short, or maybe just Aemon. 

Suddenly it occurs to me that the trees behind me are rustling in a way that suggests it is due to more than just the wind. Twisting around quickly, I am startled to see a figure emerge from the narrow path. But my surprise quickly turns to contentment when I realize it is Jon coming toward me, hands dug into his jacket pockets and shoulders stiff and raised as the chilly autumn breeze sweeps passed him.

I stand, rocks crackling under the weight of my shoes. “You didn’t have to come.”

His face twitches like he wants to smile, but something holds it back. “But you didn’t stay.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You look freezing,” he states, stepping swiftly toward me until he can wrap me in his arms and rub my back with his hands. 

I lean against him, relishing in his warmth. 

“I was worried I wouldn’t see you again.”

Looking up, I ask “You read my note, though, right? That I left on the pillow beside yours?”

Jon’s eyes dart quickly to the side and his mouth turns to a thin line. Eventually, he states in a most unconvincing manner “Yes. Of course I read it.”

I can’t help but chuckle as I snake my arms inside of his jacket and curl them around his middle. 

He continues “But, if we were to pretend like Ghost used that side of the bed as his own personal dance floor before I could see that there was a note there, what did it say?”

Chuckle turning to a full-blown laugh, I shake my head against his shoulder. “It said _Going to say goodbye to my uncle. You should do the same to yours. I’ll see you when we’re both in LA. Love, Daenerys Targaryen.”_

“You know, even though I _definitely_ read it, that note sounds so much better spoken.”

More serious now, though still smiling, I ask “How did you know I’d be here?”

“I didn’t know. But, I hoped.”

The next time I look up at him, his lips capture mine, and I bring a hand out from the warmth underneath Jon’s coat to let it rest on his cheek, holding him steady as not to end the kiss too soon. But, every time a kiss from Jon ends, it is too soon.

I hold his hand as we walk back through the trees and I find it is much more comforting than the pocket of my sweater. If not for the season and all my troubled memories, I might confuse now for ten years ago when Jon and I would take walks around the property after school. Still, though, that smile from before hasn’t left my face – not until we reach the clearing and I notice that there are not vehicles parked side by side, but three. 

Immediately, I release Jon’s hand and return mine to my pocket, suddenly afraid, but for Jon rather than myself. And sure enough, Robb soon climbs out of his Ford and walks toward us with a suspicious calmness about him. When just a few yards from us, he halts and so does Jon. I feel as though I’m an extra in a Western film duel scene. 

“What’s going on?” Robb eventually asks, his expression a calm confusion, but I know better than to believe he isn’t infuriated. “I’ve been looking for you, Dany. I’ve been worried.”

“Robb,” I say, moving toward my husband as if I have some sort of well thought out explanation when I’ve really got nothing. I’d been hoping to break the news to him that I wouldn’t be returning home with a phone call from the safety of a Los Angeles International Airport terminal, but maybe this is how it’s supposed to end. Ugly and in person.

“Dany” – Jon’s voice from behind me, and then he’s jogging up beside me and putting his hand on my shoulder to keep me from walking any farther. 

This actually triggers a true expression from Robb as his mouth frowns and his brows knit together. “Hey, don’t touch my wife!” he commands, marching toward me and tugging on my arm until I’m stumbling toward him. 

“Let go of me,” I demand of Robb, beginning to push him away, but before I know it, Jon has his hands fisted in the lapel of Robb’s jacket and is forcing him from me. I’m startled mostly because I’ve never seen Jon get physical with anyone before and the idea of him getting into any sort of physical confrontation, even if it is to defend me, makes my heart beat so painfully hard. 

“Stop, Jon!” I shout when it looks like fists are about to be thrown. I pull on his shoulders to distance him from Robb, who looks about ready to murder someone. 

“Robb,” I start calmly, stepping cautiously toward my husband as if he’s a wild animal I’m desperate to tame. “I’m not going home, okay? I can’t go back there. It isn’t good for either of us. You know that.”

“No.” He lurches forward far enough to snatch my arm once more and pull me into him. “You’re not going anywhere. You don’t get to leave. Not after what you did to me. You’re not the one who gets to leave.”

“Then leave me, Robb!” I shout, tearing up from the pain of his fingers digging into my muscle. “I don’t care! Leave me!”

“No. I’m not leaving you just so you can run off with him.”

“This isn’t about Jon! It’s about you! It’s about you and me and how we never should have gotten married! It’s about how this whole thing was a mistake! Everything between us was a mistake! I know that you know that! You don’t love me, Robb!” 

Once more, Robb is suddenly and forcefully separated from me by Jon who shoves him back a few paces. This time, despite Robb’s efforts, Jon makes sure he’s standing between us, like a moving wall keeping Robb from charging at me.

Thrusting his index finger toward me, Robb exclaims loudly and firmly “Don’t say that! I do love you! I’ve loved you this whole fucking time! Everything I do is for you!”

“You don’t do anything _for_ me! You do it to _keep_ me!” 

Averting his glare to Jon, Robb sneers “Why did you have to come here? What the fuck did you say to her? Did you come here just to convince her to leave me? Have you two been seeing each other behind my back? Have you been fucking her behind my back? Did you fuck her, Jon?” 

With his back to me, I can’t see Jon’s expression, but I know that his silence is all it takes to convince Robb. A moment later, Robb charges, and the next thing I know, they’re both on the wet ground, fighting like they’re in one of those drunken bar brawls. Ghost doesn’t like this any more than I do. He’s leaped from the back of Jon’s truck and is now growling and snapping fiercely at them. 

Fists are being thrown and Ghost is in a frenzy. My head is spinning from the commotion as I hurry over to them and grab onto Jon’s shoulders, tugging and pulling and shouting his name until he’s finally stumbling back and away from Robb.

“Jon!” I say firmly until his attention is finally on me. “Jon, you should leave.”

“What?” he asks incredulously, wearing streaks of dirt across his flesh and bleeding slightly from a cut above his brow.

“It’s okay,” I say. “Just go. I can handle it.”

Cupping my face in his hot palms, he says that he’s not going to leave without me. “Dany, just come with me.”

“I can’t. We have to do it the right way.”

“Dany –”

I wiggle out of his hands. “It’s okay. I’ll be fine.”

“No!” Jon replies sharply. “No, I’m not leaving. I’m not leaving you here with him. Not again.”

“Fuck you!” I hear Robb spit and just as I turn to look at him, he’s lunging for a round two, but with one swing of Jon’s fist, he is knocking Robb right back down to the ground. 

“Stop it, Jon!” I demand, once again pushing him a few yards back from my groaning husband. “You’re going to break your other hand.”

He takes a beat, chest heaving. “I’m sorry, but I can’t leave you alone with him.”

“I’ll be fine, Jon. Trust me.”

“I do trust you. I don’t trust him.” His eyes dart behind me to where Robb is struggling to get to his feet while Ghost continues to show him a menacing growl. 

“Then at least go wait in your truck. I need to talk to him and it’s clearly not going to work while you’re standing here. Please?”

After a full minute of Jon mulling my suggestion over, he reluctantly goes back to his truck, but Ghost remains on guard, snapping at Robb whenever he attempts to stand.

Hugging my sweater around me, I take slow steps toward Robb before lowering to my knees beside him. I study his face, bruises already forming along one side and blood staining his skin from small cuts. When his pink eyes find mine, I can’t help but feel sorry for him. I can’t help but listen to that voice in my head that won’t allow me to hurt him anymore than I already have. 

I remember how much I loathed his presence in that hospital room, sitting with me hours out of each day while I didn’t have the will power to speak let alone to tell him to leave. All I wanted was my baby – AJ – but there was no baby. 

Days I had spent just curled on my side facing a blank wall, unable to move or eat or even go to the restroom without a nurse forcing me out of my bed and walking me there. The first time I wanted to speak in all my time there was when Benjen had come to visit me. ‘Where’s Jon?’ I wanted to ask, but Robb was there, like he always was, so I just lied there, pretending to sleep while Robb railed on at a whisper about how everything was all Jon’s fault and how he’d call security if Jon attempted to see me. 

The only words I could hear Benjen speak the entire time he was there were to assure Robb in his deep, quiet voice that “Jon won’t be coming back.”

Later that night, Robb had sat on the edge of my bed, running his hand up and down my back, and said “I don’t want you to worry, Dany. I don’t blame you. This isn’t your fault. It’s _his_ fault. He manipulated you, he turned you against me, and he killed our son, but he is never going to hurt you again. I’m not going to let him come near you, okay? You don’t have to worry.” He leaned down and pressed a kiss to the side of my head. “I’m going to take care of you, Dany. I’ll protect you.”

With Robb protecting me, I never felt less safe in my life, but I eventually grew accustomed to it. And eventually thereafter, I grew dependent on him, and he loved that. I’ll never believe he ever really loved me, but he did love that.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask Robb gently, picking a leaf out of his tousled hair. “You don’t love me, Robb. Why are you trying so hard to keep me?”

“I do love you,” he insists quietly, finally a sadness in his voice without any anger. 

“You want me, but you don’t love me. You just don’t want to admit that we wasted all this time trying to make something work that just can’t.”

“You never tried. You never loved me. You never wanted me.”

“No. But I did need you, and for a while I thought that could be good enough.”

“This whole time, even after what he did, you’ve loved him?”

“It was never his fault, Robb. I was the one who didn’t want to tell you about the baby. I asked him to be the father instead. And the crash. . . The baby wouldn’t have survived either way. Something was really wrong. I could feel it.”

Tears mix with fresh blood as they glide down Robb’s cheek. “I wish I’d never met you,” he mumbles. “Every bad thing in my life has been because of you.”

I stand slowly on my aching, damp legs. “Yeah, probably. But now it can be over. You can move on. Forget about me. Find someone else, if you haven’t already. I’m sorry, Robb. I’m sorry this couldn’t have happened sooner.”

Irritation returning to him, he asks “Can you get that fucking dog away from me?”

Taking Ghost’s collar, I pull him back until he’s far enough away that Robb can stumble to his feet. He brushes grass and dirt from his pants and then starts toward his Ford. Half way there, though, he turns back to face me and calls out a pointed warning – the very last command I will ever obey from my future-ex-husband. “If you leave, Dany, then you leave for good. I don’t ever want to fucking see you again.”

It’s hard to explain the emotion I feel in this moment. It’s what I want more than anything: to never see Robb again. But at the same time, there is a sort of nervous anxiety coursing through me at the realization that my life is about to change in almost every conceivable way. Nothing will ever again be like it has been for so long. I really am about to start my life again from scratch. 

“You won’t,” I soberly assure him, and then I watch him get into his car and drive away.

As I walk to Jon’s truck, I dig a pen out of my purse along with a gas station receipt and I write my phone number onto it before handing the scrap of paper to him through his rolled-down window. “This was also written in the note,” I tell him.

Sliding it into his shirt pocket, he asks “Promise me you’ll be okay?”

With a small smile, I reply “I promise I’ll try to be okay. Are you heading back home now?”

“I’ve got to run a couple of errands first.”

“Okay. Well, next time I see you, it’ll be in LA.”

“It better. Don’t make me come back here, Daenerys Targaryen.” 

I smile just a little bit, allowing myself a small sliver of joy as I daydream about a night out in a big city with Jon Snow.

* * * * *

**JON**

“He’ll be fine down here,” spoke a gruff highway patrolman with a handlebar mustache and a beer belly to a younger, thinner officer who had taken the sharp handcuffs off of my wrists only to refasten them with my hands bound in front of me rather than behind. 

The stinging sensation as the metal rubbed against my skin was still no match for the sharp stabbing feeling in the side of my head. A quick wrapping by a paramedic stopped the bleeding from where my head had smacked against something sharp, the steering wheel maybe, but I couldn’t remember then and I can’t remember now. I can’t even remember calling the police. Maybe I hadn’t. Maybe the sound of the car veering off the road and smashing into a quarry caught someone’s attention and they called the police. Even only hours after the fact, as I sat in a basement interrogation room, I couldn’t remember anything between seeing that animal in the road and carrying Dany’s unconscious form out of the water and up to the road. 

I thought she was dead. For minutes that felt like centuries, I thought she was dead – that I had killed her. My heart was beating so loudly and so fast in my ear that when I tried to check her pulse the way I’d seen doctors do on television, I couldn’t tell if I was feeling her heartbeat or my own. She felt so cold, but I felt cold too and I wasn’t dead at all. I was very alive and hated every second of it until flashing red and white lights filled my vision: an ambulance, accompanied by two highway patrol cars. 

As soon as one of the officers smelled the alcohol on my breath, they stopped caring how afraid I was and when I kept asking if Dany was going to be okay, no one answered me. They gave me a breathalyzer, searched me, handcuffed me, pushed on my head as they put me in the back seat of the patrol car. They even read me my rights, but I couldn’t hear a thing they were saying. Just background noise to my own heart beat as I watched the paramedics strap Dany to a gurney, wheel her into the ambulance, and drive off with her. 

The interrogation began after I was left waiting in that basement room for at least an hour. When the gruff, fat officer said “The girl’s going to be fine,” I felt the life return to me and I sat up straight, wondering if this man would tell me more. 

He did. 

“The baby didn’t make it. The girl’s son. She still hasn’t woken up, but when she does. . . She’s going to know he died because of you.”

“No. No. No, it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t – I was trying – There was something. . . It’s a boy? He isn’t really dead, is he? He can’t be dead,” I spoke frantically, shaking my head and blinking away all the tears that came flooding from my eyes. “He’s not dead. You’re lying.”

“I’m not lying, son. They had to rush your friend into surgery to remove the dead –”

“Stop. Stop. No. That can’t be true.”

It couldn’t be true. That’s what I kept telling myself. That this man was lying to me and that somehow I needed to find a way out of that police station and find Dany, and my son. 

“Why would you get behind the wheel, drunk, with a girl who’s six months pregnant? What sort of a man does that?” the patrolman asked, but in my head I keep chanting _‘It can’t be true. It can’t be true.’_

And I kept on telling myself that, until I was finally allowed to see Uncle Benjen and he told me what was the truth. I woke up on a steel slab in a damp holding cell to an officer unlocking the cell door. Standing beside him, was Benjen, looking down at me like it was I who was dead, a corpse waiting to be claimed by my next of kin. 

“Jon,” he spoke gently once locked in the cell with me. “Jon, are you okay?” 

I somehow forced myself to sit up and Benjen sat just beside me. I felt his rough hand push the oily hair from my face as he continued to stare at me – still checking to see if I really was alive. 

“I’m going to get you out of here, Jon. I don’t want you to worry about that. I’m having everything taken care of. Those highway patrolmen don’t have jurisdiction over this case. I’ve spoken to the police, I’ve spoken to a lawyer, and when they assign a prosecutor, I’ll speak to them, too. Don’t worry. Everything is going to be fine.”

Everything is going to be fine. . . He actually told me that. The same words I had told Dany before I drove my car into the quarry. 

“He’s not dead, is he?” I finally asked, voice hoarse and quiet. 

“I’m sorry, Jon,” was his only response. 

“I killed him.”

“No. It wasn’t your fault, okay? I saw the report. I talked to Dany’s nurse. Well, I bribed Dany’s nurse –”

“Is she okay?” 

“She’s. . . She’s not awake yet. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

We’ll just have to wait and see. . . My son was dead, and Dany was _we’ll have to wait and see._

“I have to see her. I have to get to her. She can’t be alone. She doesn’t have anyone else. I have to –”

“She’s not alone. Robb’s with her.”

“What?”

“When Robb found out about the crash and about Dany being pregnant, he told the police he thought you’d want to hurt the baby if it was his. They got some quack of a judge to sign off on a warrant for a DNA test. I’m sorry, but because Robb was the baby’s father and no one could locate any other family members for Dany, Robb’s been the only one allowed to see her while she’s in the ICU.”

“So, he knows. He knows that I killed him.”

Benjen’s hand came to rest on the back of my head and once my tears began to pour once more, he held my face against his shoulder and I cried against his flannel shirt. 

“Don’t worry about Robb, Jon.”

“I need to see Dany. I need to tell her –”

“She isn’t awake, Jon.”

“I need to make sure she –”

“Don’t worry about her.” Benjen put both of his hands on either side of my head and pulled me back as to look pointedly into my bloodshot eyes. “You need to worry about yourself, Jon.”

“You said I didn’t need to worry. You said everything would be fine.”

“Jon, listen to me. I’m going to help you. I’m going to get you out of this mess, but you need to pull yourself together. That kid wasn’t yours. I know that you wanted him to be yours, but he wasn’t, and he was never going to be. He was Dany’s, though. And when she wakes up, the first thing she’s going to be told is that her son is dead and that she will never hold him, or look upon his face, or be able to ever properly say goodbye to him. What happened wasn’t your fault, but you were still the one driving the car. Do you really think that she’s going to want to see you?”

Benjen couldn’t afford my bail, so I was transferred to the county jail the following day. I spent two weeks there. Fourteen days of strip searches, public showering, prison food, and the constant feeling like I deserved where I ended up. But, after those fourteen days, Benjen followed through on his promise and the prosecutor assigned to my case dropped the charges. Something about a medical emergency negating my alleged intoxication, but I wasn’t really listening when Benjen explained it all to me over the phone because of the migraine I’d had since the day I entered that jail.

When I stepped out into the sunny parking lot, dressed in the clothes I arrived in, it felt like that was the first time I had smiled in ages. Benjen wrapped me up in his arms and hugged me like I was a little boy who still needed hugs and as we embraced, I realized that I really was just a boy and I did still need hugs. 

“How is Dany?” I’d asked on the drive toward Eugene. 

“She’s fine, Jon,” Benjen replied shortly, before changing the subject to something I couldn’t ignore. “That job we talked about, the one in Los Angeles. It’s a done deal. I’ve already got you a plane booked for –”

“I want to go home. I want to see –”

“It’s not a good idea, Jon.”

“Can’t I stay with you?”

“Of course you can. That’s not the issue. You going back there, back to that town. . . it isn’t a good idea. Trust me, okay? It isn’t going to be good for you to go back there.”

“What about Dany? I have to talk –”

“She hasn’t asked for you, Jon. Not once. You need to give her space. Maybe one day. . . Maybe one day you can work things out, but not yet, alright? Things are too fresh. She’s too fragile. You’re too. . .” He never finished that sentence, and I never pressed. 

“She hasn’t asked about me?”

“No. And I’ve been to see her numerous times.”

“Where is she? Is someone taking care of her? Is she okay?”

“Robb’s taking care of her.” That statement entered my brain like a spiked needle, piercing and tearing at every thought I ever had while lying in my cell. “He’s doing a good job. He’s angry, of course, but he cares about Dany, and he’s taking good care of her. That’s what’s most important, right? That she’s being taken care of?”

For a moment, I thought I might cry again, but my tear ducts had dried up long ago. Slumping back in the passenger seat, I turn my eyes to the road ahead and let the yellow lines on the side of the highway lull my mind into submission. “Yeah, you’re right,” I eventually answer, and I never brought up Dany again. 

He checked me into a hotel – the very same hotel I had just checked out of this morning – and that was where I lived for a week until Benjen would put me on a plane to LA. I didn’t do much during my time there except watch TV, take long showers and sleep more than half the day away until he would come back to eat dinner with me. 

All I had was one suitcase of miscellaneous clothes that Benjen was able to put together for me and a few toiletries and personal items. When I slid into a pair of jeans one afternoon, I found that twenty-two week sonogram in the back pocket, only slightly crinkled. I thought then of Dany and how, no matter how terrible I felt, she must have felt a thousand times worse. If my phone hadn’t died in the crash, I would have tried calling her, but I didn’t know her number by heart and even if I had, her cell had probably suffered the same fate as mine. Benjen would eventually get me a new phone with a new number. He got me a new everything. A new phone, new apartment, new city, new job and a new life, far away from Dany, far away from my family. 

“I’m sorry I let this be about me,” I say down to a newly engraved headstone, resting in the grass before a rectangular swatch of freshly shoveled dirt. “I thought you’d never want me to come back. Why would you leave me your land?”

I hold the deed in my hand like Benjen will be able to see it – the one given to me just an hour ago as I sat in Mr. Lannister’s small, dusty office.

“Is it because you wanted me to come back here? If you wanted me to come back, you should have told me to. You should have. . .” I let out a sigh, realizing I’m about to argue with a hunk of rock with a name engraved into it. “I should have come back. I should never have left. I should have been braver. But I know why you made me leave. It was because you loved me. You loved me so much you were willing to give me away on the off chance that it would make things better. And maybe it did make things better for me. I have a great job that I love. I have a house that I own. I have a dog who keeps me from completely derailing. It’s the life I wanted. It’s a good life. It was just never complete, and because of that, I never really appreciated it like I should have. And I’m sorry for that, because it’s the life you gifted me. You weren’t my father. You barely even knew me but you picked me up from that group home after Mom died and you brought me home with you to sleep on that ratty sofa until you could find me a proper home to finish growing up in.”

I look down at the deed in my hand. “Do you want me to sell it? I don’t think I could ever sell it. It meant too much to you. It means too much to me. It means too much to Dany.” I let out a sigh. “I’m sorry I could never move on. I know that you never believed that anything would ever change between Dany and me. Well, now I think you were right, just not in the way you meant it. Nothing ever changed between us. She still loves me. I don’t know if that means we’ll ever be together the way that we planned, but no matter what happens, I don’t want you to worry about me – if you can even worry about people anymore. Just, chill out with Mom and Grandpa and everyone else. I’ll be fine down here.”


	9. Chapter 9

**JON**

Back in my only button-up shirt, I mix around the spaghetti and sauce together in a pan on the gas stove with a wooden spatula, hopeful that for the first time in my life, I’ll cook something right. It’s Thanksgiving after all, and while spaghetti and meatballs may not be the first dish that comes to mind when one thinks of Thanksgiving dinner, I am determined that it be at least edible.

In the weeks since getting back home from Oregon, I’d spent much of my time after work fixing things up around my house, because as my new therapist puts it, having an orderly home facilitates an orderly mind. The carpets are washed and vacuumed. The walls scrubbed and the little cob weds in each corner batted down with a broom. The kitchen cabinets are re-organized and the bathroom tiles are bleached and shining. An IKEA run has added color to the place and I even started on landscaping my backyard so that it can look like more than just Ghost’s toilet. 

A knock on the door breaks my attention from the noodles and I squint my eyes curiously at the oven clock. After bringing the heat on the burner down to a simmer, I go to the front door and pull it open. 

“Ygritte,” I say in a surprised greeting, seeing her standing on my porch in clothes only slightly nicer than those she would wear to work. “What are you doing here?”

With an innocent shrug and a smile, she replies “I’ve been wondering how you’re doing. I’m on my way to a party but wanted to check in on you. Make sure you’re not all alone on Thanksgiving. Is that weird?”

“No,” I say quickly. “No, that’s really nice of you actually. I’m, uh. . . Did you want to come in for a minute?”

After a nod from her, I let her through the door and follow her into the living room with some awkward apprehension. 

“It looks different in here,” she says. “It looks nice.”

“Thank you.”

“Where’s your dog?”

Putting my hands in my pockets, I reply “He’s out with a friend, but he should be back in a bit.”

She chuckles with comic suspicion but doesn’t press further. “So. . . how was Oregon? Was it cathartic? You look good.”

“I don’t know. . . Yeah, I think it was.” 

“That’s good.” She smiles sweetly. “Are you cooking something?”

“Oh, yeah.” I snap into action, hurrying back to the kitchen to check on my noodles. “I’ve been trying to learn how to cook.”

“What are you making?” she asks, following me into the kitchen.

“Spaghetti.”

“Oh, well spaghetti is easy.”

“Is it?” I chuckle anxiously before glancing at the clock again. “It was nice of you to stop by, but you don’t have to worry about me. I’m doing a lot better now.”

“You look like you’re doing better.”

“And I’m not alone,” I say somewhat awkwardly. “I mean, I’m alone right now, but I’m not spending Thanksgiving alone.”

Humming under her breath, Ygritte nods. “You were expecting someone else when I knocked on the door, huh?”

“No,” I answer quickly again. “No, she’s not supposed to be here for another ten minutes or so.”

Ygritte’s shoulders drop and her eyebrows raise as she is no doubt understanding what I mean. “Right,” she says shortly, turning on her heel, and as she heads for the front door, I cringe at my own unavoidable rudeness. 

“Wait, Ygritte.” I jog over to catch her before she can run out the door. “It’s a complicated situation.”

“It’s fine, Jon. I get it. I said I couldn’t be with you and you went and found someone else.”

“It’s not like that. . . exactly.”

“It doesn’t matter. I just feel so stupid for coming over. I’m embarrassed is all.”

“Look, Ygritte. I’m really grateful that you made me go to Oregon. I wouldn’t have gone if it weren’t for what you said, and it really was what I needed to do.”

“I’m glad,” she says in a fairly non-glad manner. 

I feel so compelled to explain myself, but I force the word vomit down and just offer a sincere “Happy Thanksgiving, Ygritte.”

“Yeah, you too,” she replies and as swiftly as the words leave her mouth, she is then turning and leaving through the front door.

For only a few heartbeats after she is gone, I feel guilt, but I do not feel loss because I am still watching the clock, waiting on someone else.

Soon, there is a new knock on the door and immediately upon opening it, the old friend waiting impatiently behind it leaps into my arms and darts his tongue across the side of my face. 

I laugh through a groan and shove Ghost off of me to let him run through his domain. My attention and affection turns immediately to the silver-haired goddess entering my home with a careful elegance, wearing a flowy dress with blue flowers printed all across the light fabric. Her hands are tucked behind her back and her cheeks are tinted pink with a blush as her blue eyes and soft smile shimmer up at me. 

“Hey,” she speaks, but as soon as the word leaves her mouth I’m sweeping her up into my arms and pressing my mouth to hers. 

She giggles against my lips and wraps her arms around my neck. When her feet are back on the floor, I run my fingers through her hair and rest my forehead against hers, soaking in her essence like she may disappear in a matter of seconds. 

“I’m happy to see you, too,” Dany whispers before giving me another, slower, supple kiss. 

“How was the beast?”

“His presence at my new apartment has been a joy, however completely unnecessary.”

“I just don’t like that neighborhood. I feel better knowing he’s there with you.”

“I know you do. And I like having his company, but I assure you, everything is fine. The apartment is great. I’ve got a huge closet, the laundry room is free, it’s only a few blocks from my new job, the old lady living across the hall made me a little pot of succulents to put in my kitchen window, and so far, the neighborhood has not been a problem. I am fine.”

“You’re fine?”

“I am _fine.”_

With a wiggle of my eyebrow, I reply “You sure are.”

Dany replies with an embarrassed shake of her head before removing herself from my embrace and wandering toward the kitchen. “I smell something delicious.”

“Well, let’s just hope it also tastes delicious,” I reply, following her. “I’ve got Spam and Ramen noodles in the pantry as a back-up.”

We don’t end up needing to bust out the Spam and Ramen, though, because I managed to keep the spaghetti sauce from burning and the noodles from turning to mush. We eat everything there is, much to Ghost’s disappointment as he was looking forward to the leftovers. When both of our plates are empty, Dany reaches her hand across my small dining table and takes my hand in hers. 

“I love you,” she softly says. 

“Really?” I ask before I can stop my self-esteem issues from showing. 

“Of course. I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it,” she assures me, giving my hand a squeeze. “Just because I want to take things slow, doesn’t mean I don’t love you. Our relationship has to grow, but how I feel about you has never changed, and it’s never going to change. I promise.”

“I love you, too.”

“I know,” she says, but the way her cheeks blush tells me she still needed to hear it.

Never letting go of my hand, Dany stands and rounds the table, and when she stands just beside me, I give her my other hand to hold as well. She leans down and I meet her lips in a lingering kiss that neither of us seem to want to break. But, I eventually do break it, just to ask “Has our relationship progressed to the sex-stage yet?”

Her face scrunches like she’s mulling the question over. “Well, normally I might say it’s too soon, but since today is supposedly a holiday. . . and it’s not like we haven’t done it before. . .”

In as quick as it takes me to stand from my chair, I am scooping Dany off of her feet and carrying her through the house until I can lay her down on my bed and ravish her, tickling her collar bone with my kisses as she giggles beneath me and curls her leg around my hips.

* * * * *

**3 1/2 YEARS LATER**

**DANY**

I turn onto that dirt path off Crescent Road, stopping at the new electronic, iron-rod gate and punching the code into the key pad. I then watch as the tall contraption slowly swings open until I’m permitted to drive through. Half way to the hill, I spot that goofy beast of a dog bounding alongside my rental car with his tongue hanging out of his mouth. 

Glancing at the rearview mirror, I say “You see that? Your friend is excited to see you.”

When the path ends, I pull onto the grass and park between a couple of trucks. Ghost is already jumping at the backdoor by the time I’m shifting into ‘Park.’ 

“Ghost. Sit,” I command firmly with a smile on my face and give our faithful pet a scratch behind the ear once he’s complied. 

Of course, as soon as I’ve got Bennie unbuckled and scooped into my arms, Ghost is back to bouncing and spinning and stretching his big head up to lick at Bennie’s chubby little cheek. 

“Ghost, relax,” I say through a laugh as my two-year-old son wiggles against my hip, making grabby hands at Ghost until the dog is nipping at his little fingers. 

I put my hand to my forehead to shield my eyes from the Summer sun as I gaze up at our home, still just a skeleton on stilts, but even so, it feels like where we were always meant to be. When Jon turns from a conversation with his project manager to spot me, I give him a wave and in a moment, he’s leaping from the raised floor and bounding over to us in much the same manner as his dog until he’s pulling us both into a tight embrace. A kiss for the top of Bennie’s head and then one for my awaiting lips. 

“I can’t believe you’re here,” he says. “I thought you didn’t want to take Bennie on the plane.”

“I just said that so that we could surprise you.” I smirk. “Are you surprised?”

“I am ecstatic. I’ve missed you.”

“We’ve missed you, too. Can we come up?”

“Yes.” With a spring in his step, Jon takes my free hand and helps me onto the unfinished porch before giving me the grand tour of what he’s been working on for the past four months. “So, this is the living room.” He spins me around the large space at the front of the house surrounded by a hollow frame of wooden beams.

“Okay, but where’s _my_ room?”

“Right this way, madam.” He guides me through the maze of beams until halting me and stating joyfully “Here you are!”

I glance around me and notice that the skeleton walls are only about three feet from me in either direction. “Um, this is not my room. This is a closet.”

Wearing a wide grin, Jon pulls me forward until I’m in a much bigger space. “Alright, this is your room. That was your bathroom.”

“I have my own bathroom?” I ask with bright eyes. 

“Well yeah. You didn’t think I was going to let you use my bathroom, did you?”

I try to glare at him, but my smile betrays me. 

“So, what exactly are you going to be doing in _your_ room, Miss Daenerys Targaryen?”

I shrug mischievously. “Whatever I want.”

“See, that look right there just makes me think you’re going to be watching porn in here.”

Another mischievous shrug. “Maybe I am.”

“Alright, well I’ll be sure to put some black-out curtains up just in case.”

“Thank you.”

After another kiss to my mouth, longer and deeper, Jon insists that I vacate the bare-bones house with Bennie, stating “This place is too dangerous for two people as beautiful as yourselves.”

“Alright well we’re going to walk down to the creak and then we’ll go grab some food and bring it back. Be thinking about what you want.” 

“Aye aye, Captain.” 

I lean in for one more kiss from my sweaty husband. “You’re cute when you’re excited to see me. But, you need a shower.”

“I’ll just jump in the creak later.”

Scrunching my nose, I shake my head as I let Jon lead me protectively back to the safety of the lawn.

We leave Jon to his manual labor and Ghost follows happily along as we slowly make our way down to where the water sloshes down a slow current around smooth, colorful rocks. I lay down a thick beach towel atop my favorite boulder and perch myself atop it with Bennie in my lap, giggling as we watch Ghost splash around in the cold water, cooling himself off from the Oregon Summer heat. I bounce my leg up and down to encourage my son’s laughter. 

Shielded by the shade of tall trees, I find serenity in the sound of the water flowing and of Ghost panting and of Bennie’s gentle breathing once he’s fallen asleep in my arms. I gaze upon his peaceful face like I often do, at his olive skin, emerald green eyes and long black eyelashes. Behind my joy, however, is some sadness, much in the same way I will gaze at Jon as he sleeps, knowing that there are parts of him that I’ll never be able to figure out, missing pieces that will never be uncovered. Jon will never know who his biological father is, just as we will never know who Bennie’s biological father is, or if he’s even alive. I’ll never meet Jon’s mother, who passed away before I was fortunate enough to meet him, just in the same way I’ll never meet the woman who gave birth to Bennie before he was placed in the California foster care system after a drug overdose took her life. 

On day, Bennie will look at us the same way, with a sweet sadness wondering where these people he calls Mom and Dad came from. He’ll never meet his grandparents. He’ll never meet the uncle who’s name he holds or the uncle who his deceased brother was to be named after. Like us, Bennie will never meet AJ, but he’ll love him as much as we still do. 

But, Bennie will never feel as lonely as his parents once did, because he will never have to wonder if anyone will ever love him. His nurturer-aunt, Sansa, will be like a second mother as he will want to spend every day after school playing with her twins, just one year older than Bennie. His rebel-aunt, Arya, will drop by long enough to teach him all the crazy things about life that Jon and I will worry he’s not ready to hear, but he will be. He’ll be smarter than both of us combined. He’ll worship Bran and Rickon like they worshipped Jon when they were young. 

One day we’ll tell Bennie all the family not-so-secret secrets, if Arya doesn’t tell him first, and he’ll be confused and sad and not know what to do about it for a while, but it’ll all be okay because magical things happen when there is love present, and Bennie will never not see love between me and Jon. Even when we argue, we argue with love – we argue for each other and for our family. And when the time comes that we should argue with Bennie, we will do that with love as well. 

As my boy stirs in my arms, I sing him back to sleep. 

* * * * *

Night falls. Jon, Bennie, and I are all fed and everyone else working on the house has gone home. I watch Jon set up a tent in our bare-bones living room. 

“Oh, don’t worry. I’ve got it,” Jon says comically every time he performs a new action and I make no attempt to help. 

“You’re just doing such a great job, babe,” I tell him, snapping a few pictures on my phone of his efforts. 

When everything is set, he wipes the sweat from his forehead and opens the tent, presenting his handiwork to me. 

“Very cozy,” I reply. “But I’m not getting in there with you until you’ve showered.”

“How am I supposed to shower?”

I shrug. “Not my problem.”

He nods like he’s discovering a new, unsavory side of me, which just makes it harder for me not to laugh, and then he proceeds to strip off all of his clothes right there in front of us. 

“Oh jeez.” I bend down to where Bennie sits in his car seat beside me and cover his eyes with my palm. 

“Don’t do that. He needs to see what a real man looks like,” Jon insists as he continues to disrobe until there isn’t a stitch of clothing on him. 

I shake my head while my cheeks turn bright pink. “You can show him your manhood some other time, babe.”

Ghost doesn’t know what to make of his master’s insanity either as Jon jumps down onto the grass and we both watch him pull a hose out from under the house, crank on the water, and point the stream above his head until he’s being soaked in cold water. And I know that it’s cold based on how he begins to hop up and down and grit his teeth like he’s walking over hot coals. 

To Bennie, I coo “I think your daddy might be a maniac” and then I call out to my husband “What are you going to do for soap, smart guy?!”

Dropping the hose to the ground, he looks around himself curiously before going for the diaper bag. I snort I’m laughing so hard when he pulls out baby powder and begins to puff out it’s contents all over himself until he looks like he got caught in a snow storm while completely naked. After making a point to rub the wet, clumping powder into his skin, he picks the hose back up and douses himself once more until all of the whiteness is rinsed into the grass below his feet. 

“Now you’re all wet!” I call out after he’s turned the water off. 

“That’s alright. I’ve got a towel over here,” he replies casually as he climbs back up to the floor, and before I have a chance to make a getaway, he’s wrapping his soaking wet arms around me and pressing his soaking wet nakedness against me until the moisture is soaking through my clean clothes. 

“Jon!” I squeal, smacking his shoulder, but he won’t let go and Bennie’s cackling from his car seat. 

By the time I’m released, the entire front of my sweatshirt is soaked through and I’m giving Jon an unforgiving glare. 

“I love you,” he tries with a cute smile. 

With a heavy sigh, I peal the sweatshirt off and toss it to him. “You may as well finish the job.”

“You look magnificent,” he says as he rubs the dry part of my sweatshirt against his hair. 

Looking down, I see that the water has completely seeped through my white t-shirt and I let out another sigh. 

“You should really take that off before you come to bed.”

I send him another glare, but since he’s right, I pull my t-shirt and bra off. 

Jon gasps dramatically before bending down and covering Bennie’s eyes with his palm. 

“I hate you,” I say with a laugh. 

Thankfully, I have my luggage with me which also includes a few articles I’d stolen from Jon over the course of our two-year long marriage. Once I’m in a new shirt and shorts, I toss Jon a t-shirt and a pair of his old flannel pajama pants. Once dressed, Jon changes Bennie into his sleep clothes and I go around shutting off all the flood lights, leaving a battery powered lantern lit and bringing it into the tent as we all crawl in. 

After falling down onto the blanket-covered air mattress, I help Jon to lie Bennie down between us and once we’re all situated, I turn the lantern down to a faint glow of light and turn onto my side to face my family. Resting my hand on my son’s belly, I feel his breathing slow until I’m sure he’s asleep. 

“Is he asleep?” Jon eventually asks me, his head rested just a few inches from mine, staring into my eyes. 

“Mhm.”

He nods slowly, and then faintly whispers “I want to fuck you so bad.”

I shake my head, trying not to laugh and wake Bennie up. “We can’t.”

“I know. I just wanted you to know that I’m thinking about it.”

“You’re thinking about it?”

“Right now. In my head. And it is fantastic. You are really going for it.”

I have to clench my jaw not to burst out laughing. Once I’m calm, I whisper “I’m thinking about it too.”

“Yeah?”

“Mhm.”

“How am I?”

“Mmm, not your best work, babe.”

Smiling, he says “I’m really glad you’re here, Dany.”

“Me too. Los Angeles sucks without you.”

“Oregon sucks without you.”

“I’m sensing a trend.”

“You’re sensing correct.” 

“I love you.”

Finally pressing his lips to mine, he murmurs “I love you, too” against them between kisses. As soon as my tongue snakes past his lips, he pulls away ever so slightly and asks with a wickedness to his tone “You still thinking about it?”

A hum under my breath as I put a hand on his cheek and keep him still while I connect our mouths again. A minute later, though, the entire tent rattles as a large buffoon pokes his face against the zipped-shut door. 

“Don’t,” I tell Jon, but he’s already sitting up and unzipping the enclosure and as soon as it’s open, Ghost is worming inside, stepping over all of us until I shift over enough that he’s able to plop down between me and the tent’s wall. Now smooshed between a massive, smelly dog, and a baby I’m trying very hard not to wake, I let out a sigh. 

“Why did I think this would be a good idea?” I ask the universe, but Jon is who answers. 

“Because this is where we’re supposed to be. This is our home.”

I bring a finger up to trace the length of Jon’s nose. “You’re right.”

“But, maybe tomorrow night, Bennie could have a sleepover with Auntie Sansa and we could. . .”

Nodding in agreement of this plan, I turn my head up to the sheer ceiling of the tent and watch all the millions of stars, so bright but no larger than pin-pricks in the black sky. 

Sleepily, Jon softly asks “Can you stay awake until after I’m asleep?”

“Don’t worry,” I reply with a supportive smile to tell him I haven’t forgotten how it is sometimes still difficult for him to see me when I’m asleep – silent, still, and unconscious. “I’ll be awake for a bit longer.”

“I’ll get you some French toast in the morning,” Jon mumbles against the pillow, eyes closed and hand replacing mine atop Bennie’s little tummy as it steadily rises and falls with each of his little breaths. 

As I watch the stars blink above us, content and secure, my eyelids begin to feel heavy, but I do not dare drift off to sleep until I hear the soft sleeping sounds of Jon, Bennie, and even Ghost.

Everyone I love, safe. 

**THE END**


End file.
